Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| How ignorance and prejudice sour the West's view of Islam |
|---|
| BroHanif |
| 08/15/01 at 07:09:14 |
| below is an atricle about islam www.dailytelegraph.com/opinion How ignorance and prejudice sour the West's view of Islam By John Casey A FORMER secretary general of Nato, Willy Claes, claimed that, after the fall of communism, Islam is our new world enemy. Anyone who writes sympathetically about Islam in the press is likely to get a letter or two informing him of the worldwide Muslim conspiracy. Liberals and feminists denounce the position of women in the Muslim world. It is quite acceptable - almost de rigueur - to express vehement anti-Muslim sentiments in polite society without being accused of racism. Indeed, to disagree with these sentiments is to invite suspicion. No wonder Muslims feel misunderstood - denounced as blind male chauvinists at best, as terrorists at worst. Nor is it surprising how warmly Muslims greet any attempt by a Westerner to understand their religion. Any show of genuine respect is greeted with a touching delight. Near the Afghan border last year, I visited a madrasseh (religious school) that has close connections with the Taliban. That a foreigner was prepared to engage in serious discussion seemed to astonish them. That he had heard of Ibn Rusht (alias Averroes, the Muslim philosopher from Cordova who influenced St Thomas Aquinas) delighted them. A few years ago in Beirut, I heard a member of Hizbollah talking with enthusiasm about Thomas Carlyle - because Carlyle had written respectfully about Mohammed in the 1840s. There must be something to worry about in the fact that so many Muslims are convinced both that their religion contains the final truth, and that they are entirely misunderstood by the outside world. Add to that the ubiquitous Western islamophobia, and you have a dangerous brew. Ignorance does not help either. Even well-informed people tend to assume that the Muslim world is ruled by religious fanatics and that secular, socialist dictators such as Gaddafi and Saddam are the local equivalents of Ayatollah Khomeini. They are surprised to discover that Gaddafi is in some trouble with the fundamentalists and that Saddam's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, is the most infuential Roman Catholic in the Middle East. In the face of such elementary misunderstandings, the BBC is performing a genuine service with its excellent new series, Islam UK. With the boxer Prince Naseem as the friendly face of British Islam, they are trying to show that our own Muslims are normal, unthreatening and rather nice. You see four British Muslims performing the Haj (pilgrimage) and suddenly realising, as they encounter two million fellow-pilgrims at Mecca, that they are part of the worldwide Muslim community. There is the scholarly, rather frail imam who, when he is not deciding points of religious law, seems to spend most of his time at kick-boxing. You also follow the fortunes of a Muslim football team. More surprisingly, young girls are taught the correct method of washing and laying out a corpse. I would guess that viewers would be particularly struck by the unembarrassed way in which these people talk about their individual beliefs. They seem to range from believers in a vague, almost Anglican, sense that one of the worst sins is to maltreat animals, and that a decent life will ensure you get to heaven, to those for whom "surrender" to God (the root meaning of "islam") is a living reality. Many will be surprised to discover how intimate are the relations of Islam to Christianity and Judaism: that the Kaaba in Mecca is reputed to have been built by Abraham; that Abraham's non-sacrifice of his son inspires one of the great Muslim feasts; that Jesus is received as prophet and Messiah. The best thing about the programme, though, is not its avowed aim to show that British Muslims are fairly ordinary folk, but the sense it gives of how quite extraordinary the history of the faith is. Within a century of the Prophet's death, Muslim arms had acquired an empire that reached to Spain, southern France, central Asia and India. At its apogee, the Muslim world stretched from Canton to Lisbon, and Arabic was a semi-universal language. At its most culturally glorious period - around the 10th century - Islamic learning in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy was vastly superior to anything going on in Europe. Islam transmitted ancient Greek texts to Europe and, through Averroes, enabled Christendom to establish lines of demarcation between religious and secular knowledge. The Ummayid mosque in Damascus, the Friday Mosque of Isfahan, the Dome of the Rock and the mosque at Cordova are as fine as any Christian cathedral. In Muslim countries, Jews and Christians were recognised as genuine, if imperfect, believers - an attitude reciprocated by Christianity only very recently. The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders - in which 70,000 Muslims were slaughtered and the Jews burnt alive in their synagogue - contrasts with the re-taking of the city by Saladin, when religious freedom was proclaimed for all "peoples of the Book". Writers of the Enlightenment admired Islam. Gibbon thought that the Muslim understanding of God was "too sublime" for ordinary people, and was astonished at the resolute way in which Muslims have never degenerated into worshipping Mohammed or attributing miracles to him. The only miracle they have believed in is the language of the Arabic Koran itself, which those who can understand it in the original claim to be as magnificent as Homer or Shakespeare. It is only if you confront Islam at this level, freed of the miasma of prejudice, that you can reasonably talk also about the defects - that the current religious revival in Muslim countries has not been accompanied by any equivalent intellectual or cultural renaissance; that modern textual scholarship in studying the Koran (as Muslim scholars themselves will tell you) has begun actually to go backwards in some of the great centres of Muslim learning; that the corrupt despotisms that rule so much of the Middle East make a mockery of the Muslim claim to establish social justice. (Rage at that is what most of all drives the fundamentalists.) I hope that our own Muslims do not become too English, but keep a sense of their worldwide community, its astonishing history and its current intractable problems. The cost of becoming comfortably "normal" might be to become less interesting. The author is a fellow of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge |
Individual posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Jannah.org, Islam, or all Muslims. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster and may not be used without consent of the author.The rest © Jannah.Org |