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Islam has a
progressive tradition too
Most western views of Muslims are
founded on ignorance, says American scholar, Hamza Yusuf Hanson.
When a Welsh resistance leader was
captured and brought before the emperor in Rome, he said: "Because you
desire to conquer the world, it does not necessarily follow that the world
desires to be conquered by you." Today one could offer an echo of this
sentiment to western liberals: "Because you wish your values to prevail
throughout the world, it does not always follow that the world wishes to adopt
them." The imperial voice is based on ignorance of the rich traditions of
other civilisations, and on an undue optimism about what the west is doing to
the world politically, economically and environmentally. The entrenched beliefs
many westerners profess about Islam often reveal more about the west than they
do about Islam or Muslims. The Ottomans were history's longest-lasting major
dynasty; their durability must have had some relation to their ability to rule a
multi-faith empire at a time when Europe was busily hanging, drawing and
quartering different varieties of Christian believer.
Today Islam is said to be less,
not more, tolerant than the west, and we need to ask which, precisely, are the
"western" values with which Islam is so incompatible? Some believe
Islam's attitude towards women is the source of the Muslim "problem".
Westerners need to look to their own attitudes here and recognise that only very
recently have patriarchal structures begun to erode in the west.
The Islamic tradition does show
some areas of apparent incompatibility with the goals of women in the west, and
Muslims have a long way to go in their attitudes towards women. But blaming the
religion is again to express an ignorance both of the religion and of the
historical struggle for equality of women in Muslim societies.
A careful reading of modern female
theologians of Islam would cause western women to be impressed by legal
injunctions more than 1,000 years old that, for instance, grant women legal
rights to domestic help at the expense of their husbands. Three of the four
Sunni schools consider domestic chores outside the scope of a woman's legal
responsibilities toward her husband. Contrast that with US polls showing that
working women still do 80% of domestic chores.
Westerners, in their advocacy of
global conformism, often speak of "progress" and the rejection of the
not-too-distant feudal past, and are less likely to reveal their unease about
corporate hegemony and the real human implications of globalisation.
Neither are the missionaries of
western values willing to consider why Europe, the heart of the west, should
have generated two world wars which killed more civilians than all the wars of
the previous 20 centuries. As Muslims point out, we are asked to call them
"world wars" despite their reality as western wars, which targeted
civilians with weapons of mass destruction at a time when Islam was largely at
peace.
We Muslims are unpersuaded by many
triumphalist claims made for the west, but are happy with its core values. As a
westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam
not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive
tradition, but as an affirmation of them. I have since studied Islamic law for
10 years with traditionally trained scholars, and while some particulars in
medieval legal texts have troubled me, never have the universals come into
conflict with anything my progressive Californian mother taught me. Instead, I
have marvelled at how most of what western society claims as its own highest
ideals are deeply rooted in Islamic tradition.
The chauvinism apparent among some
westerners is typically triggered by Islamic extremism. Few take the trouble to
notice that mainstream Islam dislikes the extremists as much as the west does.
What I fear is that an excuse has been provided to supply some westerners with a
replacement for their older habit of anti-semitism. The shift is not such a
difficult one. Arabs, after all, are semites, and the Arabian prophet's teaching
is closer in its theology and law to Judaism than it is to Christianity. We
Muslims in the west, like Jews before us, grapple with the same issues that Jews
of the past did: integration or isolation, tradition or reform, intermarriage or
intra-marriage.
Muslims who yearn for an ideal
Islamic state are in some ways reflecting the old aspirations of the Diaspora
Jews for a homeland where they would be free to be different. Muslims, like
Jews, often dress differently; we cannot eat some of the food of the host
countries. Like the Jews of the past, we are now seen as parasites on the social
body, burdened with a uniform and unreformable law, contributing little,
scheming in ghettoes, and obscurely indifferent to personal hygiene.
Cartoons of Arabs seem little
different to the caricatures of Jews in German newspapers of the Nazi period. In
the 1930s, such images ensured that few found the courage to speak out about the
possible consequences of such a demonisation, just as few today are really
thinking about the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the extreme-right parties across
Europe. Muslims in general, and Arabs especially, have become the new
"other".
When I met President Bush last
year, I gave him two books. One was The Essential Koran, translated by Thomas
Cleary. The second was another translation by Cleary, Thunder in the Sky:
Secrets of the Acquisition and Use of Power. Written by an ancient Chinese sage,
it reflects the universal values of another great people.
I did this because, as an
American, rooted in the best of western tradition, and a Muslim convert who
finds much of profundity in Chinese philosophy, I believe the "Huntington
thesis" that these three great civilisations must inevitably clash is a
lie. Each civilisation speaks with many voices; the best of them find much in
common. Not only can our civilisations co-exist in our respective parts of the
world, they can co-exist in the individual heart, as they do in mine. We can
enrich each other if we choose to embrace our essential humanity; we can destroy
the world if we choose to stress our differences.
The Guardian (London) Wednesday
June 19, 2002
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