Tag: Muslims

I was born in Michigan and it is true, there is a very large presence of Muslims living in Michigan, it is very beautiful to see such a clear shift from the ethnic norm emerge nearly out of nowhere. To be immersed into a cultural collage of non-domestic origins is truly beautiful, in my opinion. While looking up some things concerning my birthplace Michigan, I found an NPR article suggesting that there has been an influx of “vandalism” in the Muslim majority city of Dearborn, MI:

“In Dearborn, Mich., the nation’s largest Arab-American community, Shia and Sunnis have long lived together mostly peacefully. But it appears that some of Iraq’s sectarian violence is being mirrored in the Detroit area, particularly in recent months. As the Muslim communities have grown and prospered, more mosques have been built and some of the divides between these sects have been brought into sharper focus.” (C. Corley, NPR)

However, I noticed that in the radio editorial, NPR journalist Robert Siegal, appears to suggest that Iraqi-Americans and Iraqi immigrants are crossing Middle-Eastern cultural conflicts into Muslim communities here in the U.S.. But if you listen closely to an immigrant brother named Karim Al-Mayhi he expresses that,

“We don’t have trouble like that, the trouble like that… is over there in the Middle East.”

Likewise, Imam Eide Alawan clearly states that the vandalism and graffiti being spray painted does not appear to be Muslim at all, reading (according to Alawan):

“…Muslims go home…”

Alawan suggests, that it was a non-Muslim doing it because of the frustrations over Iraq. I am writing on this story because it may be indicative of the kind of slanted arguments against Muslims we may see in the future. These arguments if implied in the media could attempt to further feature Muslims as a civic threat, despite the civil reality of our communities. This article is simply a heads-up to my fellow Muslims and a “wagging finger” to media hounds and pundits contemplating an expansion on Siegal’s take of the issue.

Muslims do like a good moan. Most often their target is the 'mainstream' media.

Both rarely do themselves any favours, it has to be said. Journalists know the Big Bad Muslim angle is good copy and will do anything to get it; even flying all the way to Beirut to speak to Omar Bakri Mohammed who preaches Armchair Terrorism whilst sipping strawberry juice. And certain Muslims like playing to their own gallery, indulge in victimhood and double-standards of their own, and enjoy the media spotlight despite their claims to be self-professed anti-modernists.

However, towards the end of 2006 and in early 2007, there was a story that I believe justified the scepticism that Muslims have towards the media.

The story involved the arrest of an ex-BNP member in Halifax, with what was described in the local press as 'the biggest haul' of chemicals of its kind ever found in Britain. That story did not make the mainstream news outlets, and it was left to bloggers and left-wing media outlets to try and get the story an airing. The BBC pathetically told one blogger they were too busy.

Now the trial has started, we learn that one of the men arrested, Robert Cottage, wanted to shoot the Prime Minister. But this isn't 'terrorism'. The word does not appear in the media coverage of this story (and he was not tried under any anti-terror legislation, but I concede that is a legal argument).

Let me be quite clear. My point has nothing to do with the actual case. This man, Robert Cottage, is innocent of all charges until he is found guilt in a court of law (I've put that in bold so it is clear for people who suffer from PostCommentsBeforeReadingSitis), regardless of his supposed political views, which he is perfectly free to profess and extol.

(Irony: how adherence to political correctness actually ensures an ex-BNP member can say is innocent.)

My point is to do with the blatent double-standards at work here. Even a Conservative blogger (who can't be accused of pandering to Muslim sensibilities) noted:

Maybe I have missed the [Robert Cottage] story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.

The national media need to be very careful on these issues. I can't understand the news judgement which says it's not a story when explosives are found in a BNP member's house, yet when the same thing happens in the Muslim community it is on the front page.

I wonder when Comrade Reid will show up in Lancashire to preach British values?

His services are also required in Bath it seems.

I live in Harlem and I have faced many Muslim corner-store and liquor-store owners - many of them from Yemen - about selling alcohol in the community. The excuses that I have heard are weak and unacceptable for a Muslim, excuses like:

“The Yemeni Business Committee allows the selling of alcohol to non-Muslims…”

I’m not sure how true this is, but I doubt there is any validity to these claims at all. Its frustrating because my neighborhood has a small number of Muslims (West Africans, African-Americans, Yemenis and Palestinian) and two small storefront Senegali masajid that have a very small influence on the community, practically none at all. The majority of the community of Harlem is non-Muslim African-American and alcohol consumption is a very big part of their overall daily activity. And those opposed of the non-Muslim African Americans may complain privately but do not publicly voice any resistance in my neighborhood. In other-words its big business for these store owners.

Muslim advocates of science can, by and large, be located in one of the following categories: 

Traditionalist: This groups views the origins of 'modern science' as starting with the Reformation, which led onto the Enlightenment, when nature became desacrilised and an object of mere utility to be exploited. Whilst there have been many advances, this view of nature has led to waste, greed and destruction of the environment. Traditionalists have a well-defined ontology on which their entire philosophy rests (which differentiates them from other categories), and regard other approaches as superficial or limited in their scope, lacking the holistic approach they advocate. Critics deem they promote elitism and mysticism, without offering any real solutions to alleviate problems amongst Muslims. The leading exponent of this view is Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Transformationist: Although useful, 'secular' knowledges, including the physical sciences, must undergo an espitemological correction to be of any benefit to Muslims, i.e. they must be 'Islamized'. Put simply, an ethical limit is placed on what can and can't be researched. However, the basic division of knowledge is still similar to 'secular' disciplines. Traditionalists and Relativists view Islamization as superficial as well as glossing over the hard sciences. The most well-known advocates of this view was Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, although Syed Muhammad Naqui al-Attas was the first to coin the term 'Islamization'.

Relativist: Each culture should develop a science based on their cultural values, limitations and needs (i.e. you have Islamic science, Western science, Chinese science, and so on). Science is only good insofar as it serves the community or humanity, so research should be conducted on pressing problems (e.g. research into agricultural techniques). They are the smallest of the major groupings, because their critiques of science rely on the social sciences and philosophy, something largely ignored or avoided by many Muslims (i.e. such disciplines simply do not appear on the Muslim radar). This is slightly ironic, given that this is a major criticism Relativists have of drives to 'Islamize' the sciences. Anyone familiar with the Science wars would recognise them as being firmly on the side of the so-called postmodernists. One of the most well-known (English-language) proponents is Ziauddin Sardar.

Bucaillian: Following Dr. Maurice Baucille, this group tries to marry-up scientific findings with verses from the Qur'an or Prophetic narratives. In doing so, they hope science will prove their religious beliefs. Bucaillism is popular amongst Muslims with a 'secular' education and forms one of the major strains of contemporary Muslim apologetics.

It is well known by now that the overall state of Islam as a world religion and the people who follow the religion, the Muslims, are often misunderstood, misappropriated and/or misrepresented in the Media. This occurs as a result of many factors not just bigotry and journalistic incompetence but a genuine lack of knowledge. Time and time again we see Muslims being lumped into one big homogeneous group and its rank of dissenters (i.e. terrorists), but are Muslims really a homogeneous group?

On the contrary Muslims are and have been a pluralist society rich with varying degrees of opinion and interests. And in order for there to be some success in the near future an overall understanding of Muslims as a global community must extend beyond religious and cultural superficiality. This is where the problem lies, in assumptions about superficiality (religion and culture) - superficial not to belittle the importance of religion or culture but to suggest that perhaps more than race, religion and a persons position on the war should be considered when defining Muslim identity - as if race, religion and politics were the extent of the Muslim community’s depth.

Here's an IM for you read between Dawood and Yusuf ibn Yusuf on the politics of identity, (post)colonialism and modernity. A snippet:

[W]e need to see how colonialism actually impacted our method of learning our religion and understand why various groups sprung up in reference to it either synthesizing movements engaging modernity such as  Muhammad Abdhu who called for a reform and launched a change in the way Azhar carried out its education and we have Said Nursi who proposed a radical change in Islamic education combining the madrasa with the University with the Sufi lodge and he wanted to reform Sufism so what he envisioned was a school that taught morals the sciences and Islamic law.

Then there are others like Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab who were non sysntesizers and saw reform as an internal matters – housecleaning. So for him reform needed to take place by reforming practice and belief and in the process he initiated a new approach to fiqh, aqeeda and spirituality etc. The same took place with the Deobandis the isolated themselves from modernity. We should not judge at this point we need to understand these efforts first. 

We have cultural artifcats to indicate to us the type of change that took place during the end of the Ottoman period.

The fiqhi work Mejelle {majala} of the Ottomans is an example of this effort waged to deal with modernity. The Mejelle was a codification of Islamic law in a way suitable to the demands of the Ottoman empire at the time Europe was emerging as a power or powers.  Later in Damascus we see that Mustafa Zarqa did something similiar so did Abu Zahra when they started to bridge a dialogue between Islamic Law and the established Western Legal Codes that were put in place in the Muslim world. Before them there was Sayyid Sabiq who set out to make fiqh accessible to the people given the language of fiqh become to technical and arcane for people.

Azhar made a huge change too they introduced the study of Shariah and constitional law which compared the various legal systems in addition to teaching the eight madhabs present in the Muslim world: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, Hanbali, Zahiri, Zaydi, Imami, Ibadi. We also have persons like Shah Wali Allah in Delhi  who waged a revival program and tried to address the decline experienced in the Muslim world, his synthesis of ideas happened just BEFORE colonialism started taking its toll after him his followers reacted to colonialism and from here the Deoband emerged. So we have all these people and efforts that emerged to deal with the changes taking place in the Muslim world and in Islamic education.

And here is an email/IM I shared with my fellow comrades on the Central Committee for a Greater Eterazistan and some of our sympathisers, in which I drew up a series of (admittedly simplistic) similarities between how Muslims and Americans themselves:

1. Both hold to an idea of "exceptionalism" for their own beliefs (Islam and her Ummah/the American nation).
2. Both see themselves as exemplars who can redeem humanity.
   
3. This means both think of themselves "outside" history.
4. And both consider their own beliefs to be "universal".
5. Both hold to a quasi-mythic opening to their history.
   
6. Both call the early part of their expansion "the opening" ("al-futuhat"/"the opening up of the west").
7. Both rely on the "founding fathers" concept of nation building (the Salaf/the Founding Fathers).
8. Both have a written document, to which all appeals (whether from the left/right wing or traditionalist/progressive in nature) can be made (the Qur'an/the Constitution). You cannot do without this document if you are a Muslim/American.
   
9. Medieval Muslim jurists' views on jihad can be seen as an Islamic form of the Monroe Doctrine.
10. Both are keen on an idea of "globalisation" (Muslims simply lack the power right now).

In his piece on the rhetoric of the "war on terror", Yahya Birt writes about the possibility of reimagining the history of interaction between Muslims and Christians:

The Muslim World and Europe have had a deeply enmeshed interraction, which certainly cannot be defined as characterised largely or solely by conflict. Fourteen of today’s 34 European countries were at one time wholly or partly ruled by Muslims for a century or more, and similarly all Muslim societies except for three have experienced direct European rule in the last 200 years. Yet this deep interaction is written out of European history and self-definition. Instead it is written only as a relationship of rivalry and conflict, but with no proper assessment of long periods of peaceable co-existence or of profound cultural interchange. In particular there is the huge legacy of late medieval and philosophical Muslim thought later drawn on by European Jews and Christians to create the modern West. Richard Bulliet has even coined a new term, “Islamo-Christian civilization” to denote “a prolonged and faithful intertwining of sibling societies enjoying sovereignty in neighbouring geographical regions and following parallel historical trajectories. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian historical path can be fully understood without relation to the other.”

Such an excercise would probably seek to raise Muslim Spain or Ottoman Europe from the footnotes they currently occupy in the very idea and history of 'Europe'. People would point to wars and conflict, yet no one is about to suggest that the French and English, or the English, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, are any less 'European' because they fought years of bloody conflict. And before we say these intra-European wars are ancient history, consider that World War II (the bloodiest war in human history) took place in living memory. And despite years of persecution and oppression, and the industrialised slaughter of the Holocaust, 'Judeo-Christian', a term only century or so old and originally used without the civilisational undertones, seems to have caught on (whether this term is positive or negative, historically accurate or not, is different point).