Science Talk

Ramabriga · Guest

Coming to terms with Islam in the West
6/23/2008

By: Hamza Yusuf
Zaytuna Institute - Zaytuna.org* -

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 civilizations, 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 recognize 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 globalization.

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 un-persuaded 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 marveled 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
un-reformable law, contributing little, scheming in ghettoes, and obscurely indifferent to
personal hygiene.

Cartoons of Arabs seem similar 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 demonization, 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, 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 civilizations must inevitably clash is a lie. Each civilization speaks
with many voices; the best of them find much in common. Not only can our civilizations 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.

Hamza Yusuf is an American convert to Islam who studied for several years under leading
scholars in the Muslim world. He is the co-founder of the Zaytuna Institute in California and
has translated into modern English several classical Arabic texts and poems, including the
latest rendering of the thirteenth-century devotional poem, The Burda: The Poem of the Cloak
(2002). His most recent works include The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi (2007), the first text in the
Zaytuna Curriculum Series; The Content of Character (2005), a collection of sayings from the
Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, regarding the essence of character and behavior; and
Purification of the Heart (2004), a translation with commentary of a nineteenth-century text
that examines the spiritual conditions and treatments of the heart.

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **