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I wasn't always a Muslim. There was a time when I prayed
in Jesus' name and worried about getting baptized so I
could get into heaven. I remember vividly my life as a
Christian, though it is so alien to me now. No one but a
convert to Islam can appreciate the differences between
our way of life and whatever else is out there. Be of
good cheer, though, for a 'born' Muslim can also
experience the same thing in that they can continually
renew their faith through acts of piety and Ibadah
reinforced with such actions as reflection, increased
learning, fasting and in doing works of service to
humanity.
Born Muslims, especially kids, often wonder about other
ways of life. I've had so many students ask me about
this that it doesn't surprise me anymore. It seems that
they want to compare what they have now to what others
are doing to either reaffirm in their hearts that what
they are doing is right or to see "the other side" and
determine if it might not sound better. This phenomenon
is a result of the fact that our Muslim youth are thrown
into the non-Muslim world completely by unaware parents
and its only natural that someone thrown into water will
be interested in learning how o swim, even if they
weren't really intended to live in the water. It is also
not unheard of that a Muslim will convert to
Christianity even as it is normal for Christians to
become Muslims. I feel pity for those who leave Islam.
Not because the size of our Ummah was decreased by one,
but because I know that the one who left Islam didn't
know anything about it to begin with. I also shake my
head sadly for the alternative to Islam is definitely
not the intelligent choice.
We have four kinds of Islam out there: Cultural,
Habitual, Invisible and Original. Cultural Islam as a
phenomenon is well-known. We all talk about it. We all
complain about it. Whenever we hear about some
incredibly backward or ignorant custom from Muslim
country X, Y, Z, we say, "Oh, that's cultural Islam."
But I believe this label is a misnomer and a disservice.
How can an ignorant custom ever be equated with Islam?
Is it simply because the people perpetrating it happen
to have Muslim sounding names? In the Middle East "good"
Muslim men murder their daughters for even a whiff of
dishonor. In India "good" Muslim families demand that
the girl pay a dowry to the man. In Nigeria "good"
Muslim women perform circumcision on unwilling young
girls. In most of the Muslim world, "good" parents
routinely pressure their daughters to marry against
their will. I ask you, why do we ever even mention the
word "Muslim" when describing these ignorant customs?
They're not in the Qur'an. The people may not even be
"good" in the authentic Islamic sense, perhaps indulging
in alcohol, leaving off prayers, deceiving others, etc.
By mislabeling these cultural customs as "Islamic"
cultural customs we do ourselves a disservice. We set
ourselves up for failure for no reason. It is these
kinds of practices that confused Muslims reject when
they convert to Christianity, not realizing that they
were not Islamic practices to begin with. The sad thing
is that they never knew what real Islam was. They never
saw the diamond hiding behind their tainted ethnic
cultures.
I recently read a book named, "The Trouble with
Islam" by Irshad Manji. It was quite a piece of
work. She is basically a self-professed lesbian
Muslim "Refusenik". (Whatever that is supposed to
mean.) Her premise was that she was questioning the
validity of Islam because some Muslims have done bad
things, chiefly her parents, but also ordinary Muslims
in third world countries. I'm not kidding. This is the
entire crux of her argument: some Muslims are bad so
Islam must be bad. Try that standard with Christianity and ordinary
Christians! It would fare far worse. In chapter after
chapter
she berated one ignorant cultural custom after another,
cited terrorist
activities here and there and traced a meandering path
through the ideology of the Wahhabis and came away
saying that she was "on the brink" of stepping
out of Islam and that Islam was darn lucky she was
giving it one thread of a
last chance.
Conversely, she had nothing but praise for the Western
world. Nothing bad ever happened or happens. Western
religions are noble and kind. Everyone is
a free thinker and savvy human rights pacifist. Women
are well respected and
they have complete freedom and equality and the civil
liberties and rights of all are sacred. So, in her
conclusion, Islam had better shape up or she
would leave it. There is a word for arguments such as
hers and anyone who
has ever taken a course in logic and rhetoric will know
it: fallacy. A fallacy is an argument that is not only
not proved but ill-conceived at its
core. It is contradictory, disingenuous and easily
disproved with logic that
will uncover where the mistakes in reasoning occurred.
Sadly, however, Ms. Manji is not the first to use this
odd type of mis-logic.
If we turned her logic on its head we could make the
case for every
Christian to leave Christianity and convert to Islam.
She, and others like
her, point to ignorant customs in the Muslim world as a
sign of Islam's invalidity, well then, let's look at the
opposite side of the mirror. Let us
judge the West in as likewise a shallow fashion. Hmmm.
Let's see. Where do
we begin? I know, let's start with ignorant
superstitious customs. In the modern Western world, a
huge percentage of the population believes in
astrology. They look for their horoscopes in the
newspapers and even call
"psychics" to get their future predicted. Each year
millions of rabbits lose their feet so Americans can
carry "lucky charms" in their pockets. In all
American urban centers one can find storefront Tarot
card readers, crystal
ball gazers and even places to go to get a spell put on
someone. Oh my gosh! Westerners are backward,
superstitious fools! (Don't even get me started on
the billion dollar drug trade or gambling.)
In 2004 the Catholic Church put out the figure that
3,900 priests (these are
"representatives" of the religion) have been convicted
of being child molesters.
Imagine how many have not been caught in the last
thousand years!
United States government crime statistics report that a
very large number of
children are molested by non-priests every year as well.
Incest is also widespread. Oh my gosh! Does Christian
culture teach, or condone or tacitly
support child molestation? Every few minutes a woman is
raped in the United States by fellow Christian
and Jewish citizens. It is so pervasive that it has been
called an epidemic. Are Christian values really that
depraved? And
let's not forget the thousands of annual beatings,
murders and abuses of
women and girls by spouses and boyfriends. It is an
everyday fact of life. Does Christian culture encourage
spousal abuse? The Bible does say that
women must submit to their husbands. The Bible also says
to kill all the
men, women, children and even babies of your captured
enemies, (but to save the virgin girls as slaves). It's
all there in the Bible, have you looked
lately?
Then we turn to the real shocker: slavery. Christianity
(and Judaism)
explicitly encourage slavery in their holy books. It was
just 150 years ago that slavery was perfectly legal
here. But that was the past. What about
today? There is still a lively slave trade in America
with over 20,000 men,
women and children sold yearly as slaves in the United
States, according to the United States government.
They are mostly involved in the sex
trade. What! What kind of trade? Oh, pornography,
prostitution, nude art,
public sex, nude beaches, vulgar rap music promoting
images of violence
towards women. Oh the West is quite a depraved place!
How else do you explain
the conduct of "professional" American soldiers at Abu
Ghraib prison in
Iraq? And hey, weren't they all Christians, the Germans
who killed 6 million Jews just sixty years ago?
How about the French killing 1 million Algerian
civilians or the Italians killing the Libyans or the
British massacring
people in India or the Crusaders who killed everyone in
Jerusalem in Jesus' name? (I could list many more
examples of Christian atrocities and even many
where the Bible was used and clergy encouraged violence.
Hey, the Catholic
priests in Rwanda actually directed massacres!)
Now, if I were to follow Irshad Manji's kind of
reasoning, I would have to say Christian culture is
backward, women are oppressed, the Bible is flawed
and filled with human rights problems and that
Christianity better feel
pretty darned lucky that we haven't given up on it yet.
We could examine the extremist views of the Christian
Right as an example of how the religion was
"hijacked" and we could cite the enlightened attitude of
Islam on all the
above listed issues. Now I know the world is not so
simplistic as to say I don't want to stay on the team
because a few players are lousy, but a lot of
people are just not that aware that they are making that
kind of fallacious
leap.
Are Muslim cultures stifling? Yes, but don't call them
Muslim cultures. Call them
Pakistani
culture, Arab culture, Sudanese culture,
or whatever, but
call a spade a spade. When people from those cultures
see another way of
thinking, like when an Indian family moves from a
traditional village in India to cosmopolitan Toronto or
Los Angeles, of course they will begin to
make comparisons. A first world country where money and
opportunity abound
will, of course, offer a better lifestyle than a third
world country where poverty restricts opportunity and
good government. But to blame their own
culture's shortcomings and failings on a religion is
ludicrous. I didn't
leave Christianity simply because I saw so much drug
abuse, alcoholism and immorality all around me. I left
it because intellectually it couldn't stand
up.
Sadly, what I've found when a "Muslim" leaves Islam, it
is not because
Christianity was intellectually better, but because the
"Muslim" could not differentiate between what is culture
and what is Islam. In other words, the
"Muslim" didn't know much about authentic Islam. They
just didn't know much
about it. It's like asking the average American
non-Muslim to explain something about Christianity.
Beyond a few items related to Jesus they don't
know too much. Most Muslims are in the same condition.
The simple fact is
that most people, whatever their "born" religion is,
they don't really know much about it. I don't feel
threatened anymore when I occasionally hear that
someone left Islam, for I know now that they were never
really a part of the
Islam that I learned about and converted to.
Think well on this premise. People who convert to Islam
usually describe it
as the culmination of an intellectual and spiritual
journey, while people
who convert to Christianity usually describe it as a way
to escape a stifling or backward way of life, i.e. the
backward practices of their home
country. In the first case, the person knows his own
culture and discovers
real Islam, while in the second case, the person knew
his own culture but couldn't separate it from Islam.
Thankfully, even after all the 9-11
inspired discrimination we innocent Muslim Americans
(for not a single
Muslim American was involved in that attack) suffer, and
even after all the inane ideological assaults we suffer
at the hands of the Christian Right, there is no stampede
to leave the fold of Islam, rather more Christians are
converting now than before and more born Muslims are
taking a fresh look at Islam at its core because
thoughtful people have discovered their life's
journey and have seen through the hype and separated the
cultural chaffe
from the wheat and thus our community grows and marches
from strength to strength.
Allahu
Akbar!!!
May
Allah guide US to follow the right path (Islam). Amen
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