Muslim Heretics Conference

Understanding Islamic Feminism:
Interview With Ziba Mir-Hosseini

By Yoginder Sikand

07 February, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Born in Iran and now based in London, Ziba Mir Hosseini, an anthropologist by training, is one of the most well-known scholars of Islamic Feminism. She is the author of numerous books on the subject, including Marriage on Trial: A Study of Family Law in Iran and Morrocco (l.B.Tauris, 1993) and Islam and Gender, the Religious Debate in Contemporary Islam (Princeton, 1999). She is presently associated with the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

In this interview with Yoginder Sikand she talks about the origins and prospects of Islamic feminism as an emancipatory project for Muslim women and as a new, contextually-relevant way of understanding Islam.

Q: In recent years, a number of Muslim women’s groups have emerged across the world, struggling for gender equality and justice using Islamic arguments. Most of them are led by women who come from elitist or, at least middle class, backgrounds. Many of them seem to lack a strong popular base. How do you account for this?

A: I think the majority of the women who are writing and publishing about what is popularly called ‘Islamic feminism’ are definitely from the elite or the middle class. But then, globally speaking, feminism has always had to do with the middle class, at least in terms of its key articulators and leaders. I believe that Islamic feminism is, in a sense, the unwanted child of ‘political Islam’. It was ‘political Islam’ that actually politicized the whole issue of gender and Muslim women’s rights. The slogan ‘back to the shariah’ so forcefully pressed by advocates of ‘political Islam’ in practice meant seeking to return to the classical texts on fiqh or Muslim jurisprudence and doing away with various laws advantageous to women that had no sanction in the Islamists’ literalist understanding of Islam. Translated into practice, law and public policy, this meant going back to pre-modern interpretations of shariah, with all their restrictive laws about and for women. It was this that led, as a reaction, to the emergence of Islamic feminism, critiquing the Islamists for conflating Islam and the shariah with undistilled patriarchy and for claiming that patriarchal rule was divinely mandated. These Muslim women were confronted with horrific laws that Islamists sought to impose in the name of Islam, and so began asking where in all of this was the justice and equality that their own understanding of the Quran led them to believe was central to Islam. These gender activists, using Islamic arguments to critique and challenge the Islamists, brought classical fiqh and tafsir texts to public scrutiny and made them a subject of public debate and discussion, articulating alternative, gender-friendly understandings, indeed visions, of Islam. That marked the broadening, in terms of class, of the fledgling Islamic feminist movement.

But, that said, I am not sure how far the Islamist feminist discourse has been able to effectively reach out to and influence the so-called ‘grassroots’. One heartening development, however, is the emergence of a number of NGOs working with Muslim women who are using this discourse and relaying it further, using Islamic and human rights frameworks to stress the need for gender equality and justice in Muslim communities.

Q: Surely it isn’t possible to bracket all Islamists together. There is a large diversity of opinion, including about women, even among Islamists, isn’t it? Some of them do at least sound less regressive than others on women’s rights.

A: That’s true, of course. But, for all Islamists the gender issue is of paramount significance. One of their main claims to legitimacy, which they all seem to share, is their critique of the West, a central plank of which is a moral vision that rests on strengthening the family. They don’t say that women have no rights—after all, the language of ‘political Islam’ is also one of rights. Rather, they claim that Islam gives women all the rights they need, though, what this actually means for women is, for all practical purposes, the same patriarchy.

That said, I would say that the tension between Islamic feminists and patriarchal Islamists is as acute as that between the former and many fellow feminists, who believe that Islamic feminism is an oxymoron and that , in fact, it will only strengthen the Islamists in the long-run with its use of Islamic, instead of secular, human rights, arguments.

I must also add here that just as Islamists are not a monolith, there is also considerable diversity among those who could be referred to as Islamic feminists. Many of them would even refuse to be called feminists or even Islamic feminists for that matter. But one common concern that brings them together is their demand for gender equality and justice, which they claim using various Islamic arguments. Even here, however, there may be differences in the way they conceive equality and justice.

Q; You mentioned fiqh and you also spoke about the shariah. How would you distinguish the two?

A: The shariah denotes what Muslims believe to be the divine path, while fiqh represents the historical tradition of human attempts to discern the mandate of the shariah in different situations. Now, while the two are very distinct, the former is considered to be divine and, hence, unchangeable, the latter being historically created or determined, and hence not sacrosanct and, therefore, amenable to change. However, very often both traditionalist Muslim scholars or ulema as well as Islamist ideologues conflate the two, taking fiqh, a human product, to represent or to appear as synonymous with the shariah. Therein lies the major problem that Muslim women continue to be faced with in terms of a whole slew of regressive laws that, deriving from the fiqh tradition, are wrongly presented as mandated by the shariah.

Personally, I think it makes more sense, when discussing the issue of legal reforms, to speak about the ‘Muslim legal tradition’ rather than the shariah, which remains a nebulous, furiously contested terrain. This tradition, one must recognize, is a human and historical creation and is immensely diverse. That is why there have been, and still are, so many fiqh schools which often proffer conflicting opinions on a vast range of issues, including those relating to women. Recognising this opens up the possibilities of substantial reform for it effectively highlights the separation between the sacred and the legal. This crucial distinction was widely recognized in the past, when no faqih or Muslim jurist of note would ever claim that his fiqh position was absolute and final. He would offer his own views, of course, but at the end would invariably add the phrase ‘And God knows best’, indicating that he recognized that he might well be wrong. Today, however, this practice is rare and so you have people who, completely lacking this humility, would insist that their own opinion is absolute truth, the sole or the correct shariah opinion on any matter.

In this regard I think it is crucial to always foreground the fact that what we understand of Islam—or any religion for that matter—is always just that—simply one understanding out of many, which is heavily influenced by our own personal and social location.

Q: A number of NGOs working with Muslim women, including some prominent ones that are engaged in articulating what could be called an Islamic feminist discourse, rely heavily on Western funding. Doesn’t this further open them to the accusation of being ‘tools’ in the hands of what are branded as ‘enemies of Islam’?

A: It certainly leaves them open to that oft-hurled charge, but then anyone who works for gender justice, even if she doesn’t depend on foreign money, is quickly branded with the same label! So, what other option do they have? The fact of the matter is that many Muslim women live in undemocratic contexts that lack strong civil society institutions that can support the sort of work they are engaged in. This forces many NGOs working with Muslim women to fall back on Western funding agencies. After all, the oil-rich Saudi Wahhabis are certainly not going to fund NGOs working for justice and equality for Muslim women, even if these are articulated in an Islamic paradigm. But that said, those women’s groups who, for lack of any other alternative, are forced to depend on Western funds, must be clear that they don’t become their puppets.

Q: Islam has often been critiqued for allegedly denying women their rights. The Islamists’ claim that Islam provides all the rights that women need can possibly be seen as a defensive or apologetic response to that critique. Do you think Islamic feminists are also engaged in the same sort of apologetic defense vis-à-vis critics of Islam?

A: There is undoubtedly an element of apologetics involved here, and Islamic feminism is certainly reacting to critiques and circulating discourses about Islam. It is crucial to examine the forces which the emerging Islamic feminism is facing and reacting to. These include ‘political Islam’ or what is loosely called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ that advocates a return to the patriarchal texts and advocates what it calls an ‘Islamic state’; ‘Islamic traditionalism’, which is not necessarily political, in the conventional sense of the term, but sees the fiqh tradition as almost sacrosanct and divine; ‘secular fundamentalism’ that regards religion as, by definition, unjust and rules out the very possibility of any progressive or feminist interpretation of religion; and, of course, Western, including Orientalist, critiques of Islam. What is common to all these different sets of discourses to which Islamic feminism is reacting is a very essentialised, non-historical understanding of Islam, one that refuses to recognize the diverse, alternative understandings of Islam that have always existed. Islamic feminism is also reacting to dominant Western feminist trends, according to which to be a feminist you have to be secular and must work within a secular framework, an understanding that is something heavily influenced by white, middle-class Western women’s experiences and cannot be said to be universal at all.

Islamic feminism is thus reacting to these discourses all at the same time. So, in a sense, it is an apologetic or reactive discourse, directed against those who claim that Islam does not countenance gender justice and equality.

Q: For some Islamic feminists, their use of Islamic arguments for gender equality may indeed be a serious expression of closely-held religious convictions. However, one gets the feeling, although this is just speculation, that for some others employing Islamic arguments for gender justice might simply be an instrumental use of alternate understandings of Islam in order to counter Islamists and traditionalists on their own turf or simply because operating in a Muslim context necessarily demands the use of Islamic arguments in order to gain a hearing. Do you agree?

A: It is impossible to generalize, of course, but I think there is an element of both—of sincere faith as well as, in some cases, a tactical use of Islamic arguments to reach the same conclusions and make the same demands as secular feminists would in a non-Muslim context. Public space in Muslim communities is heavily defined or influenced by Islam, and so many women’s groups believe that without using Islamic counter-arguments to press the claim for equality they would hardly get any hearing at all. Since political discourse in Muslim countries is so heavily influenced by appeals to Islam, especially with the global rise of ‘Islamism’, whether or not gender activists in Muslim contexts are believers they have been forced to engage with Islam. Since a whole range of regressive laws, as far as women are concerned, are sought to be imposed in the name of Islam, these activists, irrespective of their own personal religious beliefs, have been compelled to seek to articulate alternative Islamic interpretations to counter them.

A: With just a few notable exceptions, the key articulators of Islamic feminist discourse are all non-Arab Muslims. Does that strike you as strange, given the marked tendency among many Arabs (and many non-Arab Muslims as well) to see the Arab world as the ‘heartland’ of Islam?

A: Yes, most of the cutting-edge writing and publishing on Islamic feminism is happening at the so-called ‘periphery’ of the Muslim world, outside the Arab belt—in countries like Iran, Indonesia, and, of course, among Muslims in the West. Interestingly, much of this publishing work is happening not in Arabic, but in languages such as English, Persian and Bahasa Indonesia. I think political conditions in the Arab world are simply not conducive for such discourses to be publicly articulated. Doing this could well cost you your life. You could easily be branded as an apostate and killed.

Q: Recent years have witnessed the mushrooming of girls’ madrasas or Islamic seminaries in various parts of the world. Do you think these institutions could help galvanise and popularize Islamic feminist tendencies while empowering their graduates to become women religious authorities in their own right?

A: Frankly, I do not think so. At least, this is not happening now, though I don’t know how the future will unfold. The girls studying in most such madrasas are trained in the same traditional way. They are not allowed to question things, leave alone criticise received views. They are not encouraged to ask any questions—if they do they are made to feel as if they are questioning Islam itself. They are reared on the patriarchal fiqh tradition, which, although a human product, is treated as almost as sacrosanct as the Quran itself. In such a situation, how can one hope for Islamic feminist stirrings to emerge from these madrasas?

Q: Not all the ulema of the madrasas are horribly misogynist, unlike what is sometimes made out. I know a few younger Indian madrasa graduates who are quite receptive to the sort of arguments that Islamic feminists are making. Don’t you feel it is crucial to identify and work with such ulema, rather than to brand all ulema as irredeemably sexist or misogynist?

A: I agree with you entirely, but the problem is that most Muslim societies are characterized by a yawning educational, indeed epistemological, dualism so that there is now little or no contact between the ulema of the madrasas and ‘secular’ or ‘modern’ educated Muslims, who also include key Islamic feminists. This dualism marks a major departure from the classical past, where knowledge of the times was an integral component of education in the madrasas where the ulema were trained. Colonialism pushed aside Islamic Studies from the educational ‘mainstream’, a process that continued in the post-colonial period in Muslim countries. So, now, the ulema—or at least the vast majority of them—have no idea of contemporary sociology, economics, political science and so on. They are wholly incapable of dealing with the new and myriad challenges of modernity. That, incidentally, is something that makes them so defensive. It is also a class issue. Modernity came to Muslim countries on the back of colonialism, and so it is mainly the poor who now inhabit the madrasas. Their economic location and the overall culture of the madrasas, which cannot be seen apart from this economic issue, further inhibits their receptivity to the ideas being generated by Islamic feminists.

Q: You have worked extensively on Islamic feminist articulations in Shia-dominated Iran. Do you think that the Shia version of Islam, because it allows for continuous ijtihad or independent interpretation of the sources of Islamic tradition, might be more progressive, as far as women’s issues are concerned, than the Sunni version?

A: Frankly, despite ijtihad I do not think that with regard to women’s rights the Shia ulema are any different from their Sunni counterparts. Of course, the possibility of ijtihad in the Shia tradition is a good thing, but we need to go beyond theory and see how the religious tradition plays itself out in the real world, in its interaction with the state, the wider society and the international context. What is really key here is the presence or absence of political will for reform. So, for instance, in Sunni Morocco, because the King was heavily in favour of women’s rights, and because the palace, the parliament and women’s groups were able to come together on this issue, the country now has a reformed personal law wherein women and men have almost the same rights. Now, despite the presence of ijtihad in the Shia tradition, the Iranian ulema have, by and large, displayed no such enthusiasm for legal reform for promoting women’s rights in Iran.

Q: The focus of many key Islamic feminist NGOs is the reform of personal laws in Muslim contexts that militate against women’s equality. Do you see this as a somewhat narrow focus? After all, personal law is not the only problem that many Muslim women face? For many of them, grueling poverty, for instance, might be an even more pressing concern.

A: I think the issue of gender relations within the family—which is what personal laws are all about—actually relates to the core of power in society at a broader level. Since the family is the basic unit of society, only if there is justice and democracy within the family can you possibly have justice and democracy in the wider society. In other words, the key to democratizing the whole society is to democratize its basic unit, the family, and for this legal reform is crucial.

Q: By exploring and articulating gender-friendly fiqh prescriptions, do you feel that, somehow, many Islamic feminist scholars are unwittingly further legitimizing and strengthening the fiqh tradition that, on the whole, is solidly patriarchal? Why not circumvent the fiqh tradition altogether and articulate an Islamic feminist understanding based simply on what could be called core Quranic values, such as justice, kindness, mercy and equality? Wouldn’t that make the whole effort much simpler?

A: Fiqh as a legal tradition with centuries’-old roots in Muslim societies cannot simply be wished away even if you wanted to! Ignoring fiqh won’t make it disappear! But Islamic feminist scholars and activists are not just articulating alternate fiqh prescriptions to counter blatantly patriarchal ones. Many of them are engaging with several paradigms at the same time—progressive fiqh and tafsir or Quranic interpretation, human rights arguments, international instruments, laws and treaties, and, above all, the lived realities of Muslim women. This is something that the book I am presently working on seeks to grapple with—exploring questions of Islamic feminist constructions of family law or, even, feminist family law, looking at the writings of new reform-minded Muslim scholar-activists with a focus on issues related to gender. In a sense it is a modest attempt to go beyond the two major blind spots that we have for so long been faced with—the blindness of Islamic Studies as an academic discipline to gender issues, and the blindness, indeed, aversion of the secular feminist ‘mainstream’ towards religion, its language, categories and frameworks.

Q: Are Islamic feminists simply arguing for the same ends as secular feminists but by using Islamic arguments? In other words, is it a case of the ends being the same but only the means being different? Or is it that Islamic feminists (or, some of them, at any rate) might be offering something in their vision of gender and womanhood that the secular feminist project lacks?

A: For me feminism is both a consciousness that women suffer discrimination at home, at work and in society and in life because of their gender, as well as action to do something about this. So it is a striving for justice and equality for women in a just world; it is a frame of mind and a way of life, a kind of path that can be followed by everyone – regardless of gender, sex, race, faith and other differences among us. But justice and equality are contested and relative concepts, in the sense that they mean different things to different people in different contexts. There is also an epistemological side to feminism, it is also a knowledge project; in the sense that it tell us how we know what we know. Feminist scholarship in Islam as in any other religious tradition has a lot to offer to both the understanding of religion and the search for justice. But feminism, as an ideology, as a movement, as well as a knowledge project, in order to grow and not to become dogmatic, needs to have a critique from within. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black and ‘Third World’ feminists provided that critique; for instance, Audre Lorde’s criticism of mainstream feminist literature of the 1960s for its focus on the experiences of white, middle-class women and their values; Chandra Mohanty, with her seminal article “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse”, offered a potent critique of the complicity of feminism and colonialism. Such criticism helped feminism to grow theoretically and become more inclusive.

In my view, what Islamic feminists have to offer now is to help ‘mainstream’ feminism to look at its own troubled relation with religion and to re-examine some its dogmas – now that religion has come out into public space, and that the whole thesis that modernization will bring the decline or privatization of religion is now seriously questioned. Feminists need to reconsider why, in the course of the 20th century, was it necessary for them to be secular? And what does being ‘secular’ and what does being ‘religious’ mean in today’s context?

Q. What could secular feminists learn from Islamic feminists? Do you personally agree with the overall secular feminist critique of the notion of the complimentarity of the sex roles that underlies general Muslim understandings? Might there not be some merit in this notion, which Western and Western-influenced secular Muslim feminists in general do not (or refuse to) acknowledge because of their particular way of conceiving gender equality as sameness?

A. I would certainly insist that we all can learn from each other. As for the notion of ‘complementarity of sex roles’, I passionately disagree with the way it has been conceived and articulated by dominant Muslim discourses. It is simply a new and ‘modern’ way of justifying inequality and discrimination, but expressed in a language that can fool women and Muslims. If one probes deeply in the literature and engages with those who argue for complementarity – as I have done in my work – one finds that in fact they accept the premises of classical fiqh and its conceptions of gender – for instance, men’s right to polygamy and unilateral divorce – but they either try to modify its harsh edges or provide new justifications for it. I must say that I have become allergic to the terms ‘equity’ and ‘complementarity’, because they have come to mean inequality and discrimination. The fact is that both polygamy and men’s right to talaq are basically unjust in our context and in our time; and they are at the very root of suffering for the vast majority of Muslim women. There is no way that one can rationalize and justify them in the name of Islam and shariah – these rights were not given to men by the Qur’an, but by classical jurists; the way the jurists originally formulated these rights did provide women with a measure of protection in a culture and society in which patriarchy and slavery were part of the fabric of life. In other words, they are juristic constructions that no longer reflect contemporary notions of justice.

But, then, there can be a good side to ‘complementarity’, in the sense that feminist theory has now come to appreciate that the kind of equality that basically entails a purely legal or formal reversibility of roles does not bring women real equality. Women do not start from the same starting point in life as men, and they are not on a level playing field, so we need a new concept of equality that takes into account difference. The fact is that neither are all women exposed to discrimination nor do they experience it in the same way; race, class, education, ethnicity, being part of the ‘third’ or ‘first’ world – all these factors matter. Men are as oppressed as women in many situations, and are sometimes are dominated by them. There has been a shift in feminist theory from formal models of equality to what is now called substantive equality – there is now a big debate going on, and Muslims need to take part in this debate. We need to rethink old dogmas, both religious and feminist, and this is where we can learn from each other.

Zia Mir-Hosseini can be contacted on zm4@soas.ac.uk

Understanding Islamic Feminism: Interview With Ziba Mir-Hosseini

France considers ban on Muslim veil in public domain

Elisa M. Valbuena-Pfau

Page 1 of 2 next >

Media Credit: nytimes.com

This month, the U.K.-based Daily Mail reported that French President Nicholas Sarkozy declared the burqa and niqab, full-body veils worn by Muslim women, “not welcome” in France, and stated that the veils are ”a sign of debasement that imprison women.”
The burqa is a full-body garment with a mesh screen over the face worn largely in Afghanistan, and the niqab is a full-body veil with slits for the eyes and is seen more widely in the Middle East.
President Sarkozy and French lawmakers are calling for a ban on the full-body veil in all public institutions, including post offices, universities, hospitals and public transportation. France has about 3.5 million Muslims, representing about six percent of the population, according to research by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
“The full veil is simply a prison for women who wear it and will make no one believe a woman wearing it wants to integrate,” said UMP (Union for a Popular Movement — the current controlling party in France) head Xavier Bertrand to Daily Mail.
According to an opinion poll collected by the U.K.-based Times Online, Bertrand’s view is consistent with that of two-thirds of the French population who also would like to see the veil banned in public. Viewing it as a symbol of religious fundamentalism, this majority also considers the veil an offense to their country’s secular foundation.
Despite the popularity of the proposed ban among French citizens, however, many Muslim women who wear the veil deny that it is an overt sign of female oppression.
“You are going to isolate these women and then you can’t say that it is Islam that has denied them freedom, but that the law has,” said Mabrouka Boujnah, a language teacher of Tunisian origin, to CNN.
Boujnah, who at 28 is about to have her first child, condemns the proposed law as inherently repressive and undemocratic, stating it takes away a fundamental right of Muslim women.
She and her friend Oumkheyr told CNN they prefer to cover their faces out of piety.
Oumkheyr, who refused to give her last name, is in her forties and unmarried. In a statement to CNN, she said that she even has friends who wear full veils against the wishes of their husbands.
Boujnah and Oumkheyr, both French citizens, say they are only following their religious beliefs and France should respect that.
However, while not necessarily agreeing with President Sarkozy’s rationale, many French Muslims believe that the full veil goes too far.

France considers ban on Muslim veil in public domain - World

Book Review

Reformist Voices of Islam—Mediating Islam and Modernity

Thursday, December 03, 2009 09:25:21 PM, Yoginder Sikand ummid.com

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‘Reformist Islam’, today an oft-heard slogan, is notoriously difficult to define, for it can mean different things to different people. Recent years have witnessed the sudden burgeoning of volumes on the subject, but this book is not just a repetition of what has already been written before.

Ambitiously global in its scope, it brings together writings by well-known Islamic scholars and activists, each of who provides a broad survey of ‘reformist’ Muslim voices in the part of the world that they are most familiar with—Shireen Hunter, editor of this book, on Iran, the noted Egyptian scholar Hasan Hanafi on North Africa, Riffat Hasan on South Asia, Martin van Bruinessen on Indonesia, Farish Noor on Malaysia, Recep Senturk on Turkey, Farhad Khosrokhavar on Europe, and Tamara Sonn on the United States.

These writers deal with a number of other contemporary Muslim scholars and scholar-activists, outlining their own and varied approaches to the question of reform in Islamic thought. These are simply too numerous to name, leave alone discuss, here, but they all share certain common methodologies and, to an extent, goals.

Firstly, these scholars all insist that what they are engaged in reforming is not Islam itself, but, rather, certain aspects of commonly-held human understandings of Islam. They see their task as seeking to revive what they regard as more authentic understandings on these issues.

Secondly, they are profoundly dissatisfied with the approach of the traditionalist ulema, wedded to the doctrine of taqlid or imitation of jurisprudential precedent, of the ulema allied with state authorities (who generally do their bidding) and of radical Islamists.

Thirdly, they all advocate ijtihad or creative reflection on the primary sources of the Islamic faith—the Quran and Hadith or Prophetic traditions, although they differ as to the extent they believe ijtihad is permissible and on the qualifications needed to engage in this exercise.

Fourthly, they stress the crucial distinction—often ignored by many traditionalist ulema as well as doctrinaire Islamists—between the shariah, as the divine path, which they regard as God-given and, therefore, perfect, and fiqh, human efforts to understand the shariah and express it in the form of rules, which, being a human effort, is fallible. Unlike the shariah, which is eternal, fiqh can, and indeed, should, change in response to new conditions as well as the expanding body of human knowledge, they unanimously insist.

Fifthly, many of them claim (an argument many other Muslims would differ with) that certain aspects of the Quran and the Hadith, mainly dealing with legal matters, are context-specific, and hence may not be applicable, at least in the same way, in today’s vastly different context. These include, for instance, certain injunctions related to women and non-Muslims or to criminals.

Sixthly, several of them argue for what could be called a ‘values-based’ reading of the Islamic scriptural tradition, stressing the relative importance of the spirit over the letter of these texts.

Using these methodological tools, these ‘reformist’ Muslim scholars revisit traditional Islamic as well as modern Islamist thought, dealing with a wide range of issues: women’s rights and status, relations between Muslims and people of other faiths, madrasa education, international relations, economic and political institutions, secularism, democracy, citizenship in a modern state, war and peace, and so on. In the process, they articulate alternate Islamic understandings on these subjects that depart considerably from traditionalist as well as Islamist positions, and that appear much more socially-engaged and contextually-relevant.

For those eager to hear ‘progressive’ Muslim voices on a whole host of issues of contemporary import (and strategic interest), this thoroughly engaging and immaculately-researched book simply cannot afford to be missed.

Name of the Book: Reformist Voices of Islam—Mediating Islam and Modernity

Edited by: Shireen Hunter

Publisher: Pentagon Press, New Delhi (www.pentagon-press.com)

Year: 2009

Pages: 322

Price: Rs. 995

ISBN: 978-81-8274-3

Reformist Voices of Islam—Mediating Islam and Modernity | ummid.com

The problem with Rifqa Bary

December 2, 8:36 PMRichmond Muslim ExaminerAyesha Noor

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Rifqa, a born Muslim American teen, converted to Christianity and was allegedly threatened with death by her parents. She insists on saying that the Qur’an commands her parents to kill her. In her interview, she says, “You dont understand, Islam is very diffrent. If they love Allah more, they have to kill me, my blood is Halal now, because I have turned to Christianity, its honor killing, its in Quran, you dont understand”. Rifqa Bary is absolutely right when she says, “you dont understand.” However, the one not understanding what Islam teaches is herself and those who want to kill her (if any).
The alleged punishment of apostasy in Islam has no basis in the Quran and was not practiced by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). There is not a single verse in the Qur’an which commands the killing of someone who reverts from Islam. In fact, the Holy Qur’an announces the freedom of religion by saying, “there is no compulsion in the religion” (Holy Quran 2:257).
One definite verse that refutes the death penalty for apostasy is as follows:
“Surely, those who disbelieve after they have believed and then increase in disbelief, their repentance shall not be accepted. and these are they who have gone astray. As for those who have disbelieved, and die while they are disbelievers, there shall not be accepted from anyone of them, even an Earthful of Gold, though he offer it in ransom. It is these for whom shall be a grievous punishment, and they shall have no helpers.” (Holy Qur’an 3:91, 92)
This probably is the most conspicuous verse about apostasy. Can someone even refer to a hint of killing in this verse?. If anything, it promises the life of an apostate by saying “then increase in their disbelief”. If they were to be killed immediately then how could they increase in their disbelief? There are at least seven verses in the Qur’an that refute the alleged punishment of apostasy in Islam. On the other hand, not a single verse goes in its favor.
Advocates of the penalty of death for an apostate base their argument on the following verses:
But if they repent and observe Prayer, and pay the Zakat, then they are your brethren in faith. And We explain the signs for a people who have knowledge. And if they break their oaths after their covenant, and revile your religion, then fight these leaders of disbelief— surely, they have no regard for their oaths—that they may desist.’ (Holy Qur’an 9:11-12)
This is the summit of their argument and even that goes against them. First of all, the fighting is supposed to be against the leaders of disbelief rather than the individuals. Secondly, the purpose of “fighting” is revealed in “that they may desist”. So, if they were to be killed then how will they ever get a chance to desist. Most importantly, critics and ignorant alike forget the very following verse which further qualifies verses 11 and 12. “Will you not fight a people who have broken their oaths, and who plotted to turn out the Messenger, and they were the first to commence hostilities against you?”
The focus is to only fight those who were first to be hostile towards you. Is this not a policy America enacts? Or, any nation of the world? Does such a nation exist that allows another nation’s attack, and does not respond? Why then, when the Qur’an mentions a law adopted by every government of the world, do people take issue?
Misinterpretation of patent Quranic verses by Muslim Ulema have not only lead to the unjust killing but have also distorted the image of Islam. Mis-interpreters of Islam are the real enemies of Rifqa Bary, not Islam itself.

For more information on this issue, please refer to:

http://www.alislam.org/library/books/Apostasy-in-Islam.pdf
http://www.askislam.org/religions_and_beliefs/islam/question_823.html

The problem with Rifqa Bary

Islam’s arrested development

Islam did ancient science brilliantly, but today Muslims lag behind. To catch up, they must demand the freedom to question

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The question: Can Islam be reconciled with science?

Material resources are immaterial to the current sorry state of science in Islam. To do science, it is first necessary to accept the key premises underlying science – causality and the absence of divine intervention in physical processes, and a belief in the existence of physical law. Without the scientific method you cannot have science because science is all about objective and rational thinking. Science demands a mindset that incessantly questions and challenges assumptions, not one that relies upon received wisdom. If this condition is not fulfilled, all the money and machines in the world make no difference.

Can Islam accept the premises of science? There are some versions of the religion that can, and others that simply cannot.

But before proceeding further, let me distinguish between ancient science – which Muslims did brilliantly – and modern science. They are not quite the same but are so often confused together that it is important to make the point. The ancient science of the Greeks, Chinese, Muslims, and Hindus was a rather limited affair that did not put any theological system under undue stress. Scholars observed, drew a few conclusions, and wrote a treatise that only a few could read. It was inconceivable at that time to imagine that the workings of the entire physical world could be understood from just a handful of basic principles. There was almost no link to technology and therefore no impact upon how people actually lived.

Not so for modern science. This product of the European Enlightenment is now the essence of a universal human civilisation. Although it was fuelled by the discoveries of ancient science, including Muslim science, the Enlightenment had an impact that was totally different from the stellar works of individual ancient scholars.

Modern science defines our world by constantly creating new technologies. It also claims to explain everything from the scale of the atom to the universe, and from times that range from the present to the very birth of the universe. It evokes resistance among traditionalists because it offers an explanation of how humans emerged from the depths of biological evolution to their present form. All this makes it hugely different from ancient science, which is what the Greeks and Muslims – as well as Chinese and Hindus – had done so splendidly in their respective times. So if a civilisation did great ancient science, this does not automatically mean that it is equally qualified for doing modern science.

To return to the issue of the compatibility of science with Islam: at one level the for-and-against arguments resemble those for Christianity. Islam has had its share of pro-science reformers, such as the 19th century figure from India, Syed Ahmad Khan and the Iranian Jamaluddin Afghani, who argued that miracles specified in the Qur’an must be understood in broad allegorical terms rather than literally. Following the rationalist (Mutazillite) tradition of 9th century Islam, Muslim rationalists insisted on an interpretation that was in conformity with the observed truths of science. This meant doing away with cherished beliefs, also held by Christians, of the great flood and Adam’s descent from heaven, etc. It was a risky proposition at that time but it was far safer than it is today when the mood has shifted away from empirical inquiry.

On the other hand, fundamentalist versions of all religions, including Islam, are philosophically averse to the notion of material forces running the world. They insist that the divine hand constantly intervenes, and so individual wellbeing requires constant supplications to the powers “up above”. This belief system ascribes earthquakes, as well as drought and floods, to divine wrath. On this basis, it would be fair to say that Saudi Islam, or the various Wahhabi-Salafi-Deobandi versions, reject material causality and hence the very basis of modern science.

Shia Islam, on the other hand, while politically assertive and insurrectionist, is less inclined towards pre-modern beliefs. Ayatollah Khomeini was quite content to keep science and Islam in separate domains. He once remarked that there is no such thing as Islamic mathematics. Nor did he take a position against Darwinism. In fact, Iran is one of the rare Muslim countries where the theory of evolution is taught. Today it is a front-runner in stem-cell research – something which President George Bush and his neo-conservative administration had sought to ban from the United States.

But there is another side of the coin: Khomeini also developed the doctrine known as “guardianship of the clergy” (vilayat-e-faqih) which gives mullahs much wider powers than they had generally exercised in the past. Instead of being simple religious leaders, in post-revolutionary Iran they became political leaders as well. This echoed the broader Islamic fusion of the spiritual and the temporal, something that science is acutely uncomfortable with.

To conclude: scientific progress in Muslim countries requires greater personal and intellectual freedom. Without this there can be no thinking, ideas, innovations, discoveries, or progress. The real challenge is not better equipment or faster internet connectivity. Instead, to move ahead in science, Muslims need freedom from dogmatic beliefs and a culture that questions rather than obeys.

Islam’s arrested development | Pervez Hoodbhoy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The backwards forward

Posted by Nadeem F. Paracha in Featured Articles on 10 1st, 2009 | 39 responses

There is an informative debate show on a local private channel called Alif. The show is mostly about the various philosophies of Islam and their place in Pakistan and rest of the Muslim world. A moderator usually invites up to four intellectuals every week, with two of them usually being ‘moderate’ in outlook while the other two guests hold a more conservative view on the discussed topic.

Even though it is one of the more academically sound Islamic programmes compared to the myopic disasters viewers are bombarded with in this respect, Alif almost always ends up hitting an intellectual dead-end.

The reason for this is the common consensus Muslim scholars of all shades have had on the traditional version of Islamic history. So no mater how diverse their views and interpretations of what constitutes Islamic philosophy and law, they all usually end up with almost exactly the same agreement on Islamic traditions that emerged some time in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, after which the ‘gates of ijtihad’ were said to be closed.

However, many modern Islamic scholars have now started to point out that the roots of political and social problems that the Muslim communities started to face after Muslim imperialism began its decline after the eighteenth century can be traced to the laws, politics and social bearings constructed from the pitfalls of the consensus reached among various Islamic schools of thought on what constitutes Islamic history and tradition.

They believe that this history and the traditions that it cemented stopped being investigated critically and thus ended up creating gaping misconceptions and leaps of logic about what Islam meant and how it was practiced during the Prophet’s time.

In other words, the history of early Islam that is taught to every Muslim child and is taken as the primary source by almost all Muslim scholars and historians was never put to any serious intellectual test and modern investigative methods.

On the other hand, western historians, while investigating the theological history of early Christianity, tried to a understand the ‘historical Jesus’ in place of the ‘theological Jesus’ whom they discovered (and claim) was different from his historical self.

The theological Jesus, they figured, had very little to do with the actual events in history and was more a creation of Christian priests and scholars who appeared almost two generations after Jesus. According to these historians, the theological version of Jesus was formed for political and evangelical reasons in which the person of Jesus was exaggerated and his personality molded according to social and political norms and nuances of the time when early Christian priests were formulating the personality of Jesus through their exegeses of the Bible and the Gospels.

Early Islamic history has hardly ever been treated and investigated in this manner. Some early attempts were made between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, but these attempts were largely the work of Christian apologists who failed to take an unbiased and objective view of the subject and generated their work more as a way to pitch the ‘authenticity of Christian history’ against that of Islam.

However, in the twentieth century, small groups of secular European academics and scholars picked up the pieces and started to investigate early Islamic history using the academic methods historians and anthropologists use to study non-theological history. So far the results have been startling, and many progressive Muslim scholars and historians too have agreed to some of what the rigorous investigations and secular study of early Islamic history has generated.

The most controversial among the investigators was the late Dr John Wansbrough, a leading historian and researcher at London’s prestigious SOAS institute. Though controversial, Wansbrough triggered an academic wave in which a number of respected historians and scholars started studying early Islamic history with the same academic and investigative tools with which historians study the historical context of the Bible and with which general history is studied and its authenticity determined. Wansbrough was at once criticised by Muslim academia for undermining the importance of primary Muslim sources in his study.

Other leading historians in this respect have been Prof. Patricia Crone, Martin Hinds, Michael Cook and Prof. G R. Hawting – people whose critical look at early Islamic history has been largely respected by a number of modern Islamic scholars.

The meeting point where these western academics and many progressive Muslim scholars have managed to reach is the fact that almost all early Islamic history is based on just a single complete biography written on the life of the Prophet. It appeared in 750 CE (by Ibn Ishaq), or  about a century and a half after the demise of the Prophet. In fact, this biography has only survived in the writings of Ibn Hisham, who wrote a biography of the Prophet in early ninth Century.

Modern western and Muslim scholars now believe that the accuracy of these biographies is unascertainable because instead of any written documents, Ishaq and Hisham used memorised accounts of the life of Prophet Muhammad (hadiths) as sources.

Historians now view the hadiths with caution, insisting that they cannot be taken as accurate historical sources because they first started to be documented more than a century after the Prophet’s demise.

The reason why early biographers of the Prophet, and early Islamic lawmakers who used hadith accounts to formulate the shariah, could not use any tangible written documents (other than the Qu’ran) was that even a hundred years after the demise of the Prophet there were almost no documented Muslim sources at all about early Islam. Ibn Ishaq’s biography is the only surviving source (written 130 years after the Prophet).

Modern Muslim and western scholarship studying Islam believes that Islam’s progressive evolution was mutated and it became increasingly static after ulema started to compare the human condition of their time with a rather romanticised version of Islam’s early history that was constructed purely on memorised accounts. Accounts that were first put to writing more than a century after the Prophet are likely to have gone through various lapses.

Scholars like Wansbrough, Crone, Hinds, Prof. Ziauddin Sardar, Mohammad Arkoun, and authors such as Irshan Manji, Sumanto Al Qurtuby, and Rashad Khalifa believe most of these memorised accounts of the Prophet and of life under the first four Caliphs were documented more than a century after the Prophet’s demise and then ‘projected back to the time of the Prophet.’

The reason to do so were largely political because at the time Islam was a rapidly expanding imperialist force and needed a politico-religious anchor, especially in the conquered lands that had different (or opposing) faiths as dominant religions.

This tradition was carried across all major stages of Muslim imperialism and the Islamic doctrines were further expanded through scholarly assumptions about life under the Prophet and the ‘rightly guided Caliphs.’ The hadith remained the primary source.

At the decline of Muslim imperialism some time in the late eigteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the narratives on which much of Islamic history, philosophy and law were constructed during the imperial phase started to seem static, especially in the face of former Muslim powers coming under waves of western imperialism.

Islamic Scholars and leaders appealed for a return to the basics in an attempt to reform Islam and Muslim societies that they now thought had been ‘adulterated’ by their long imperialist exposure to the rituals of other religions.

The hadith still played the primary role in this respect, but many reformist scholars and leaders now chose the more conservative hadiths to transform Islamic law into a harsher article of faith and legislation, believing these would help Muslim societies ‘retain their true identities’ under western imperialism.

That said, there were also reformists who found Imperialist Islamic dictates to have become static and decadent and they wanted to ‘modernise’ Islam by trying to adopt modern western laws and technology.

But since both these strains of Muslim reformists continued appealing to the nostalgia of Islamic imperialism’s heyday, and to the more mythical narratives of ‘perfect Islam’ under the four ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs,’ the historical and legislative doctrines of Islam based on the conservative reformists’ views managed to bag a more attentive audience in Muslim societies. It is out of these doctrines that concepts like Political Islam would eventually emerge. A concept whose more retarded strains are what we now call Islamic militancy and ‘Islamo-fascism.’

Interestingly, Islamic reformists too continued to draw their legislative, political and historical conclusions from eighth- and ninth-century hearsay accounts as if modern society was still responding to medieval impulses.

Consequently, even today many Muslim historians and lawmakers carry on defining the shariah and Islamic history using a history constructed from memorised and backwardly projected accounts of the Prophet.

Most progressive Muslim scholars however, have pleaded for a more investigative look at Islam’s early history without the use of eighth- and ninth-century perspectives. To do that they beseech the need to be much more cautious about memorised accounts based on simple hearsay. They say that the hadith should be used watchfully and, perhaps, only when it supports or expands the teachings of the Qur’an and not as a legislative response to the political and social dynamics of modernity that can only leave Muslim societies hanging in a limbo between mythical historical narratives and modern material impulses.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

The Dawn Blog » Blog Archive » The backwards forward

“Islamo-Fascism” and incendiary speech

By Scott Steinkerchner OP

David Horowitz, from the blog http://lesterhhunt.blogspot.com/2008/05/david-horowitz-not-consistent-friend-of.html

In this STLToday article we learn that St. Louis University disinvited David Horowitz from speaking at a campus event entitled “Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights” because “the school was concerned that the event could be viewed as ‘attacking another faith and seeking to cause derision on campus.’” Here we seem to have the classic conundrum of a university in a free society, how to balance the rights to free speech and the free exchange of ideas with the need to stand against the spread of hatred, bigotry, and one-sided distortions of truth. Did SLU balance these needs or was the university’s decision “outrageous” as Horowitz charges?

I don’t know, and I don’t think the article in STLToday gives us enough information to decide, and I think we should hear more about this. Extremist rhetoric shuts down the exchange of ideas, preferring to convince its listener by stirring primal fear and anger rather than convincing the listener through logic, and we have far too much extremist rhetoric clouding our political scene, preventing the truth from getting out. This is the heart of the issue with what was wrong with Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “YOU LIE!” at President Obama during his address on health care reform. It did not serve to invite conversation, it attempted to cut off communication.

Serious issues deserve serious conversation, and that can only happen when the conversation remains civil, like we strive for here at “Civil Religion.” I doubt that SLU’s actions rose to level of “outrageous”, but perhaps they were regrettable. Who can say? The article notes that “SLU” (who exactly?) had asked for the student group who was sponsoring the event to make some changes that would have made it more balanced, and only cancelled it when these suggestions were rejected. What were the changes? It seems reasonable for SLU to have asked the organizers “to, for example, include scholars on Islam with different perspectives.” Would that have been a bad thing?

I call on the Post-Dispatch to tell us more, to give this important local story the coverage it deserves in fair and balanced coverage that gives its readers enough information to make an informed decision. Right now, it just seems crazy all the way around, with the STLToday article provoking ire from all sides (as is obvious from the comments) since it highlights only the controversy and not the real facts behind the story–the article itself adding to the incendiary rhetoric of our times. I suspect the truth is far more rational and instructive. Let’s try and find it out.

“Islamo-Fascism” and incendiary speech | Civil Religion | STLtoday

By Jacqueline L. Salmon

If you are interested in the concentrations of Muslim populations worldwide, take a look at the cool (or alarming, depending on your perspective) interactive graphic produced by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center.

Using proportionate bubbles, it maps the size of Muslims communities worldwide. It’s part of Pew’s big demographic study of the global Muslim population, which finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages and that one in four people living today is Muslim.

(By way of comparison, most estimates put the worldwide Christian population in excess of 2 billion, making up one-third of the world population.)

But back to the graphic. While 80 percent of the world’s Muslims live in countries where Muslims are the majority, some Muslims communities that are minorities in their homeland are larger than in countries that we traditionally think of as Muslim. The study found that more than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of the Muslim population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.

For example:

• China has almost the same number of Muslims as Saudi Arabia.
• Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined.
• Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.
• India has one of the world’s largest concentrations of Muslims.
• Of countries with Muslim populations, the U.S. has one of the smallest.

These numbers “aren’t necessarily unknown,” says Pew Forum senior researcher Brian J. Grim. “But to look at the world and see where the large populations of Muslims live is astounding.”

What does this mean politically? A lot. In some countries, the proportion of Muslims is enormously sensitive. In Nigeria, where the sizes of the Muslim and Christian communities are enormously sensitive, census questions to determine people’s faith have caused riots and deaths.

But this study is just the beginning for Pew, says Alan Cooperman, the Pew Forum’s associate director for research. It is the beginning of an ambitious project to map the world’s religions and explore their growth and the attitudes of their adherents. Pew’s next phase is to project population growth among Muslims 10 and 20 years from now. Those numbers will be released next year.

Pew also recently completed face-to-face interviews with 19,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa (where the vast majority of people are either Christian or Muslim), where they were questioned about religious beliefs, practices, pocketbook issues, the degree of overlap between the majority religions, traditional religious beliefs and attitudes of Muslims and Christians towards each other.

Pew is also mapping the Christian population, its projected growth country-by-country, and Christians’ beliefs and practices. Then it will will move onto the other major world religions, said Cooperman.

For anyone interested in the spread of particular faiths, world strife, and for those looking for a sense of what this world will look like in the coming decades, the Pew reports will be essential reading.

God in Government: Pew Maps Muslim Populations Worldwide - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

Opposition leader Moussavi accuses Ahmadinejad of misusing Islam

Middle East News

Sep 5, 2009, 12:20 GMT

Tehran - Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Moussavi has accused President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of misusing Islam, his website reported Saturday.

‘Islam is frequently referred to but seldom followed,’ Moussavi said in a statement carried by his website Kalame.

Moussavi is one of main opponents of Ahmadinejad, whom he has charged with fraud in the June 12 presidential election, and whose re-election he refuses to acknowledge.

‘Islam is filtered and those parts (of Islam) which are not beneficiary are simply skipped,’ Moussavi said.

Ahmadinejad last week called on on the judiciary to arrest initiators of recent post-election unrest in what was seen as a clear reference to Moussavi, former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi and ex-presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

Karroubi vowed to continue realizing people’s legitimate rights, while Moussavi said protests and the ‘Green path’ - a reference to the colour of Moussavi’s supporters - should go on.

‘There was no way other than to continue the Green path for confronting called liars and fraudsters,’ Moussavi said.

He accused Ahmadinejad and his supporters of ‘performing the ugliest acts’ under the pretext of religion, although one of the main aims of Muslim prophet Mohammed had been to ‘gain perfection of ethical generosity.

‘Acts such as killing, torturing prisoners are made, plus other acts which I am ashamed of even mentioning,’ he added, an apparent reference to claims of prison rapes.

Karroubi said last month that some young women and men had been so brutally raped in jail that they suffered injuries to their genitals.

Although both government and parliament categorically denied the accusations, but Moussavi and Karroubi reaffirmed the charges.

The newly appointed head of the judiciary power, Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani, has formed a special committee to investigate the rape charges.

Protests following the presidential election led to over 20 deaths having been officially acknowledged, whjile the opposition claims that their number was 72.

Of some 4,000 arrested, over 100 - including former reformist officials - are still in jail, and charged by the revolutionary court of planning to topple the Islamic system.

‘The hearings are show trials with no legal and religiously legitimate basis,’ Moussavi said.

He once again rejected charges by Ahmadinejad and his faction that the opposition seeks to topple the Islamic system.

‘We want to maintain the Islamic republic and its system, we want social calm, we are against any violence and radicalism - but we also believe that these can only be made possible through respecting people’s will and implementing the constitution,’ Moussavi said.

One of the Moussavi’s main complaints is the interior ministry rejection of peaceful demonstrations which are allowed under the Iranian constitution.

The Iranian government has reportedly even prohibited former president Khatami from holding his annual speech at a religious ceremony in the fasting month of Ramadan in fear of renewed unrests.

Ex-president Rafsanjani was also replaced as one of the Friday prayer leaders in Tehran - again, apparently in fear that his presence could lead to further unrest at the weekly ceremony at Tehran university.

Opposition leader Moussavi accuses Ahmadinejad of misusing Islam - Monsters and Critics

Ramadan 2009: America and Islam

James J. Zogby

I HAD the distinct honor of being invited to address this year’s Iftar dinner at the Pentagon, together with Ms. Farah Pandith, the State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, and Ms. Dalia Mogahed, of the Gallup Corporation. In attendance were over 125 American Muslims, members of every branch of the US military, and their guests from the White House, Congress and other government agencies.
The evening provided an opportunity for reflection on the changes that are occurring among American Muslims and in the US’ relationship with Islam.
When I first came to this city, over 30 years ago, there were no Iftars, nor was there any formal recognition of Ramadan or the Eids by anyone, anywhere. I can recall going to the Reagan White House to propose a presidential Eid message and being asked to write it. And then reminding them each year after that.
The practice was broadened and institutionalized during the Clinton years, with President Bush adding an Iftar dinner, which he hosted each year of his presidency.
At this point, there are Iftars all over this city — the White House, State Department, Congress, National Security Agency, and more.
A primary factor accounting for this change and the growing recognition being given to Ramadan, is the presence and vitality of a growing Muslim community. There are thousands of Muslims serving in the US military and hundreds serving in every branch and agency of the US government.
It is not just that the US is heavily engaged in the Muslim World, it is that America’s Muslim community is no longer invisible. Their presence, hard work and contributions to our country are being recognized. And with that, their faith is being appreciated. A tribute to American Muslims, yes — but also a tribute to the capacity of America to grow and change.
In many ways, this is a unique country. One of our most enduring qualities is our openness and the absorptive character of our national identity. Despite the persistent rantings of some bigots, no one religion, ethnicity or culture defines us or limits who can be one of us.
America possesses an alchemy, of sorts, with its remarkable capacity to transform people and itself. With citizenship you get more than a passport and the right to vote — you become American. And that is not all, because, in the process, America becomes changed. As each new wave of immigrants has come to our shores and become Americans, the very character and definition of the country and its culture has changed.
Look at our food, listen to our music, see our style — in all of these are the threads woven from the many diverse peoples who have come to make up the rich and diverse nature of America today.
It is a lesson, some are slow to learn, but learn it they must, and learn it they do. Twenty-four years ago, for example, I was called to Dearborn Michigan, where the leading candidate for mayor in that year’s election had just sent out a mailing to every household in the city. Blazoned across the front page were the words “The Arab Problem” — which he went on to describe as the danger posed by a large influx of Arab immigrants flooding the city, who don’t share “our darn good way of life”.
As that community grew and prospered and changed, the city and mayor changed, as well. Years later, I went to Dearborn to receive, from that same mayor, the official “masbaha” of the city of Dearborn. He opened the ceremony with greetings in Arabic, quoted the Qur’an and then spoke of the contributions Arab-Americans had made to his city. (Note: in this year’s Dearborn elections, five of the fourteen candidates for city council are Arab-Americans!).
On another occasion, I was called to Michigan to deal with a crisis that had erupted in the schools during Ramadan. Muslim children who wanted to fast had asked to have a study period during lunchtime. Instead, they were made to sit in a corner of the cafeteria. Other children began to taunt them, some threw food at them. Fights broke out and some of the Muslim children had been suspended.
When I met with the Arab-American children and their parents, one 14-year-old girl told me that she had spoken with the principal and suggested a solution.
The problem, she said, was that the non-Muslim children “don’t understand our culture. Maybe we can help them learn about us.” To which the principal responded “our job is to teach you our culture, not to learn your culture”.
That 14-year-old Yemeni-American girl was right and her principal was dead wrong.
When America is at its best, it is growing, learning, changing and becoming more diverse and better.
And so, as I looked out at the Pentagon audience of young men and women, dressed in the uniform of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and saw the pride their commanding officers had in them, and heard the stories of their service and valor, I thought of that 14-year-old Michigan Muslim girl (who, incidentally, is now a grown woman teaching US military personnel about Arabs and Islam) — and of the America that is embracing Muslims, transforming itself and becoming new. And I was proud.

Saudi Gazette - Ramadan 2009: America and Islam