Peddle it Somewhere Else

@suek #126:

>>suek, you have never asked me for a “more balanced view” of Islam reading. But I can tell you that Wordsmith has provided those at every opportunity.>>

Not true. I’ll provide a link tomorrow.

Not true what? A link to what? 😐

@suek #118:

Mata…

I _think_ I’ve read every comment you’ve made in any of the related threads. I _think_ I’ve checked out all the links you’ve provided. Perhaps not. I’ll try to go back and check. But. I have _never_ seen one that indicated what you claim. I even asked you specifically for some suggestions for reading what you feel is a more “balanced” view of islam –

suek, perhaps what Mata means about “do your own homework” is that a more “balanced” view, or perhaps one that is an alternate view, can be readily found if that’s something you seek in earnest.

Go to your local bookstore and pick up Sumbul Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door. A book I’ve cited a couple of times, already. If you don’t wish to buy it, flip through to chapter 7 on Women in Islam and simply empty your cup for one brief moment; just suspend what you know or think you know and listen to a different perspective from someone who lives Islam and who does not feel oppressed by her faith; someone who is not an outsider looking in.

Aside from Ali-Karamali’s book, I also cited this one for smorgasbord, but also taken to task by you:

According to John Esposito’s The Future of Islam, pg 153, majorities in some of the most conservative Muslim countries support equal rights. Majorities of both men and women surveyed in a dozen Muslim countries believe women should have:

*The same equal rights as men (61 percent of Saudis, 85 percent of Iranians, and in the 90 percent range in Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Lebanon).

*The right to work outside the home in any job for which they qualify (90 percent in Malaysia, 86 percent in Turkey, 85 percent in Egypt, and 69 percent in Saudi Arabia).

*the right to vote without interference from family members (80 percent in Indonesia, 89 percent in Iran, 67 percent in Pakistan, 90 percent in Bangladesh, 76 percent in Jordan, 93 percent in Turkey, and 56 percent in Saudi Arabia).

Not all Islamic societies force women to wear head or facial coverings. Women who wear coverings by choice might even tell you that they feel more liberated, not less:

Syed maintains that when a woman is covered, men cannot judge her by her appearance but are forced to evaluate her by her personality, character, and morals. “I tell them that the hijab is not a responsibility, it’s a right given to me by my Creator who knows us best. It’s a benefit to me, so why not? It’s something every woman should strive to get and should want.”

Muslim women might also tell you that they believe the Koran raised the status of women and puts them on an equal status with men. Disagree? Take it up with them. I’m not an Islamic scholar, but Sumbul Ali-Karamali argues the point in her book, The Muslim Next Door and cites passages from the Quran (Chapter7, Women in Islam) to support the claims.

You dissented and I told you to take it up with her (a “cop out”) because she is pushing the argument. I’m not. She believes the oppression of Muslim women is not the result of Islam, but the result of 7th century development of Islamic law by religious male scholars who favored pre-Islamic cultural traditions and norms over the feminist reforms that the Quran had to offer.

Pg 126, she writes:

Just as wealthy Meccans had been resistant to Muhammad’s oversetting of their tribal system, the new Muslims, born of that same patriacrchal system, sometimes resisted the changes Muhammed and the Qur’an mandated. Umar, the unswervingly loyal companion to the Prophet and later the second of the Rashidun caliphs, resented the Prophet’s prohibiting men from beating their wives.

Pg 122:

In pre-nineteenth-century England, too, a woman had no property upon marriage because her husband automatically received full ownership of it. A wife’s infidelity constituted grounds for divorce, but a husband’s infidelity was acceptable, even expected. A wife had virtually no right to divorce, and even a man could obtain divorce only by an Act of Parliament. A man had every right to beat his wife, as long as he did not endanger her life.

Given that the status of women all over the world until the last few centuries has been inferior, Islamic reforms concerning women in the seventh century were significant. Because of the Qur’an, women suddenly had a right to inherit property- daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers became mandatory heirs. Women could not be forced into marriage. They kept their property upon marriage. Women were parties to the marriage contract and no longer objects of sale. Husbands did not own their wives as property. Women could testify in court. Their husbands were not allowed to abuse them because the Prophet said the worst of his followers were those who beat their wives.

~~~

But I think parts of the Muslim world have gone backward since then.

She points to women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan as examples of a few of the places where Muslim women are oppressed; and that some Islamic countries have a long way to go yet with respect to women’s rights but claims it is a cultural issue, not a religious one.

Pg 127-8:

The Sunni religious scholars could not bear to give up their male-dominated laws of inheritance that existed in pre-Islamic Arabia. It made absolute sense to them that men should get everything, and it made no sense to them that women should get anything. What had women to do with protecting the tribe, after all? But the Qur’an had commanded that women must inherit. What were they to do?

They grafted Qur’anic inheritance reform (which were advantageous to women) onto the existing pre-Islamic law (which were disadvantageous to women) and used the pre-Islamic law as a default whenever the Qur’an was not absolutely specific. Sometimes they invented twisty, convoluted interpretations of inheritance verses with the sole purpose of clinging to their fondness of primogeniture (the practice of leaving the entire estate exclusively to the eldest son).

In contrast, Shi’i religious scholars threw out the old pre-Islamic system of inheritance and built a completely new one based on the Qur’anic verses. Unsurprisingly. the Shi’i law of inheritance is more beneficial to women and closer to the Qur’an than Sunni law. That, too, however, bears the interpretive stamp of seventh-century men. The Qur’an did not cover every contingency, and that is where they could not help but impose their patriarchal worldview.

~~~

The unfortunate, tragic, and frustrating thing is that some countries opporess women by using Islam as an excuse. That is culture, not religion, and largely the reason, I assume, that Islam is perceived as sexist. This perception is one of the hardest to overcome. When I told an acquaintance that Islam was not sexist, she asked sincerely, “Oh! Would you move to the Middle East then?”

Well, no, I cannot think so. (And I did find it troubling that she expected me to move to the Middle East just because I was Muslim). But that is not because I think Islam is sexist. It is because the United States is my country. It is because many Muslim countries are still part of the developing world and I appreciate my American conveniences and my American civil liberties. Some countries do repress women in the name of Islam, and I unquestionably would balk at living in those. But this is because their cultures are sexist, not because Islam is sexist.

Here’s something else to ponder over…And yes, I’m citing Juan Cole, someone who I generally disagree with on political and historical perspective. But read this:

I am sure the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world will be startled to find out that they have all converted to Wahhabism or are committed members of al-Qaeda. Amis is uttering pure nonsense. Islam remains a big tent with many competing worldviews and the internal debate for the soul of Islam will no doubt continue well into the future. This debate is reflected in a robust fashion within the Arab world, which Amis and most other secularist pundits remains deaf to for some reason.

This past summer I led a group of Americans to Morocco to learn more about Islam and to meet with Muslims. While there I watched the Arab and international media available in nearly every Morooccan home (satellite dishes appear on even the most humble shanty town homes). I watched a debate held in Doha, Qatar between Muslim liberals and fundamentalists on the role of women in society. In these debates, which are beamed throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the fundamentalists always appear as backward looking and inarticulate, and the Muslim liberals passionately advocate for serious reforms based on a more enlightened and liberal interpretation of the Koran and Islamic traditions. Liberal Muslim reformers have not won the day but neither have the fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Islam is not all that is going on in the Muslim world, and a strong case can be made that it is the radical fundamentalists who are in the minority position among Muslims.

What Amis and his mentors on Islam (Sam Harris especially) seem, astonishingly enough, to miss, is that Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim brotherhood, are just not representative of the 1.2 billion Muslims on the planet. Ahmadinajad in Iran along with his mulla backers is not representative of Iranian Shi’a en masse. My experiences in the Middle East are limited (living in Egypt 1983-84 and travels in Morocco in 2005 and 2006), but I can tell you that after living and traveling among Arabs my view of the Arab world is different from the picture painted by armchair analysts like Amis. The picture that Amis and others paint of Muslim culture (wife beating, anti-intellectual, not curious about the world beyond their borders, militant and religious authoritarian in style) just doesn’t jive with what I have experienced. What Amis does is not very subtle but no doubt effective for many of his readers. After asserting without any proof that radical Islamism has won the day, Amis informs us what this actually means when he provides a lengthy and often perceptive description of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual force behind radical Islam:

“. . . [Sayyid] Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia – barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to ‘exterminate’ Islam – and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example.”

The implications of Amis’s deceptive rhetoric is that since Islamism won the Muslim civil war and is now the guiding force behind what we now know as Islam, which means that the majority of Muslims believe that Americans are “infidels” and therefore “unworthy of life.” This is pure racial and religious prejudice of the extreme kind.

I have spent endless hours talking with Muslims on the streets of Arab towns and never felt threatened or in harms way as an American visiting a Arab country; I have never spoken with Sunnis or Shi’is who feel that it is their religious duty to kill me or all non-Muslims because we are worse than animals. Muslims, from mosque preachers to garbage collectors, have never shown me the kinds of fanaticism that Amis leads us to believe are now pandemic in the Arab Muslim world. In my visits to the Arab world I have always been showered with kindness, hospitality, and enjoyed vigorous debates on religion.

Amis runs out a true but deceptive fact to try and make a supporting point that Muslims are divorced from the modern world Muslims today due to a lack of curiosity of all things non-Islamic. Amis observes that, “Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.”

I agree with Amis that the Arab world needs to open up to the West in many ways. However, my observation is that Americans seem much more insular and lacking in curiosity than Middle Eastern Muslims. In Morocco, everyone I spoke with was more informed about world affairs than most college grads here in the US. This whole issue about lack of translations into Arabic is just one part of the story. While in Fes, Morocco this past June attending the celebration of the World Sacred Music Festival put on by Muslims to celebrate the beauty and diversity of spiritual tradtions, I told my 15-year-old son that I wanted him to watch the news. We flipped through the channels and were able to view news from French, German, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and Moroccan services. In Morocco I saw more news and information about Sri Lanka and Thailand in 7 days than I have seen in 40 years on American television. My teenager son was blown away not only by the breadth of information that was available on the Moroccan news but by the warmth and joie de vivre of the Moroccans. He plans to return to Morocco to study French and Arabic and to learn more about the world beyond the monolingual perspective of insular America. Typical were my conversations with Abdu’llah, who helped guide me through the maze of old Fes. Although he is dirt poor and has only a fifth grade education, Abdu’llah speaks 5 languages and could no doubt hold his own in political dialogue with Mr. Amis.

What I do agree with Amis and others is that the Islamic fundamentalists need to be addressed constantly, that their views must be confronted and shown to be harmful to all. Islam stands in need of constant reform, as do all religious traditions. This is happening and what writers like Amis and Harris always ignore is the moderate and liberal mainstream of Islam.

I agree with Amis that Islam is too often presented as a totalalizing and authoritarian system beyond reason. But, again, this is not universally so or even the predominate view. Furthermore, how different is that from Catholicism? Just as I don’t see Pope Benedict as the true voice of Catholicism vs. Hans Kung or Sister Joan Chittister, I don’t see Osama or the fundamentalist preachers as the true voice of Islam vs. people like Queen Noor, Hamza Yusuf, Omid Safi, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Sheikh Ahmed Abaadi, and all the other moderate and liberal Muslim voices that can be heard around the world.

What Amis in London and most Americans need to begin to understand is that battle for the soul of Islam is not over but just beginning. Moderate and liberal Muslims are engaged in creating an alternative to fundamentalist visions of Islam. It is happening in groups like Progressive Muslim Union, at the historic meetings of World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace, and at countless events and in books and web sites where Muslims seek to bring about an Islamic renewal movement that sees no contradiction between belief in the Koran while opposing theocracy, supporting democracy, defense of the rights of women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies, defense of freedom of thought, and belief in the potential for human progress. These Muslims need the support of non-Muslims rather than the kind of distortions about what Islam is that Amis has offered. ‘

@Hard Right:

Terrorists are poor and uneducated? Wow Word, it looks like you dropped a big load of BS with that one. I could have sworn that you yourself had stated in the past that many if not most terrorists are middle class or higher and well educated.

I have and I did. HR, please re-read the comment(s) again.