Varieties of Muslim Experience
First, obligatory self promotion. I've done an interview with Leonard Lopate on WNYC regarding my book. Both the link to that, and to the book itself, are on the sidebar, pick up a copy.
I've been reading Sayyid Hassan Qazwini's wonderful book, American Crescent, describing his life as an Imam in one of Shi'a Islam's largest American Masjids, and how he, as a firm, pious, traditional believer, reconciles entirely life in America with the good life in Islam, quoting the Prophet's son in law and Shi'a Islam's first Imam to the effect that your land is the land that treats you well. America, he says, has treated him well, as compared to the persecution suffered by him and his family in Iraq in particular. It really is a heartwarming, rich and quintessentially AMERICAN memoir that deserves to be more widely read than it is. So many people ask, "why is it that Islam has no tolerant and modern voices?" and yet all I can think when I see his book is "why is this book #500,000 on Amazon's rank if people really want to hear tolerant voices?"
There was one set of things that sort of caught my eye reading it, and that I wanted to delve into for a second, relating to the complexity and variety of the Muslim experience. There are times when Sayyid Qazwini says something to the effect of "Islam says . .. " or "in Muslim societies. . ." and then something follows that I find unrecognizable. Not something I disagree with or don't like, but something where I think "who does that?" The first example was when he mentioned that he cannot readily write "dear" in a letter addressed to a woman because in Muslim societies one really does not do this.
That is not my experience. I right dear, or "al anisa al fadhila al aziza", all the time to women in my emails. OKay not if I've never met them, but same for men, "dear" isn't just surplus polite verbiage in Arabic, it does mean something suggesting you know the person, but never in my life, to a woman veiled or unveiled, has it occurred to me that there is anything wrong with "dear", or aziza in Arabic, addressed to a woman. In fact, if I wrote to two professors I know in Basra in the same letter, and addressed the man with "dear" and the woman without, I actually think it would come across as offensive.
The second related to the Sayyid's engagement, where he said that in Islam, following engagement, the man may visit the woman's home, but going out is impossible. Serious social restrictions remain in place. Again, not my experience. In my experience, once engaged, couples go out all the time. Yes the marriage is not supposed to be consummated certainly, but unchaperoned and at dinner is entirely normal. Nobody would say something in the circles that I swam, if a woman and her fiancee were wandering streets together shopping or eating. Some of these folks were quite religious, it didn't matter.
The point is not that I have some sort of ability to decide what is or is not Islamic, and have made appopriate corrections, that would be dumb of me, the point is that in fact the diversity and multifacetedness of Muslim society is such that at times what one person, even a learned person, even an Imam, describes as something that is typical of Muslim societies, another person who considers himself quite intimate with such societies wonders what he's talking about. And that's two Iraqi Shi'a at this point.
I learned this lesson in a rather stark way living in Indonesia, where my secretary was a pious, believing Muslim with a scarf covering her hair. I got to know her fairly well, and one day some dude came by in a bike, and she hopped on. I asked the next day if this was her fiance. No, she said, just my boyfriend. It came as quite a shock to me because in many Arab societies, and certainly Iraq, hopping on the back of a bike of a man not related to you is likely to get you killed, and no respectable woman ever utters the word "boyfriend". But in her circles in Surabaya, this was clearly not the case.
The point is that I think all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim tend to generalize from our own experiences, and that this can mask some of the wondrous varieties of the Islamic faith. I can't imagine a veiled Muslim woman with a boyfriend. The Sayyid can't imagine liberal use of the word "dear" in missives. The Indonesian secretary looks at us and thinks we must be of some sort of cult. We see certain types around us, they then seem typical, we extrapolate, and out comes Islam as recreated from our own experiences, while the reality is considerably more subtle.
This natural and often harmless phenomenon replays itself to much more devastating effect, I think, the reaction of all too many Americans to Islam post 9/11. They see the horrors, they see some random Palestinian village dancing, they know no other Muslims, brave men like Sayyid Qazwini try to reach out, but in the fear and the noise and the cacophony and the ignorance, an ugly picture starts to emerge. And all of a sudden a group of violent, angry, stupid group of thugs, a group that if they ever crossed paths with Sayyid Qazwini, or me, or my former Indonesian secretary, would behead us in an instant, these people start to define our faith. And we actually have to explain why we are different than people who want us as dead as they want any American dead. The complexity, the muliplicity, the variety and the wondrous totality of the Muslim experience disappears, and we're all reduced to something quite repulsive. It's probably the saddest aspect of our experience these days.
HAH
I've been reading Sayyid Hassan Qazwini's wonderful book, American Crescent, describing his life as an Imam in one of Shi'a Islam's largest American Masjids, and how he, as a firm, pious, traditional believer, reconciles entirely life in America with the good life in Islam, quoting the Prophet's son in law and Shi'a Islam's first Imam to the effect that your land is the land that treats you well. America, he says, has treated him well, as compared to the persecution suffered by him and his family in Iraq in particular. It really is a heartwarming, rich and quintessentially AMERICAN memoir that deserves to be more widely read than it is. So many people ask, "why is it that Islam has no tolerant and modern voices?" and yet all I can think when I see his book is "why is this book #500,000 on Amazon's rank if people really want to hear tolerant voices?"
There was one set of things that sort of caught my eye reading it, and that I wanted to delve into for a second, relating to the complexity and variety of the Muslim experience. There are times when Sayyid Qazwini says something to the effect of "Islam says . .. " or "in Muslim societies. . ." and then something follows that I find unrecognizable. Not something I disagree with or don't like, but something where I think "who does that?" The first example was when he mentioned that he cannot readily write "dear" in a letter addressed to a woman because in Muslim societies one really does not do this.
That is not my experience. I right dear, or "al anisa al fadhila al aziza", all the time to women in my emails. OKay not if I've never met them, but same for men, "dear" isn't just surplus polite verbiage in Arabic, it does mean something suggesting you know the person, but never in my life, to a woman veiled or unveiled, has it occurred to me that there is anything wrong with "dear", or aziza in Arabic, addressed to a woman. In fact, if I wrote to two professors I know in Basra in the same letter, and addressed the man with "dear" and the woman without, I actually think it would come across as offensive.
The second related to the Sayyid's engagement, where he said that in Islam, following engagement, the man may visit the woman's home, but going out is impossible. Serious social restrictions remain in place. Again, not my experience. In my experience, once engaged, couples go out all the time. Yes the marriage is not supposed to be consummated certainly, but unchaperoned and at dinner is entirely normal. Nobody would say something in the circles that I swam, if a woman and her fiancee were wandering streets together shopping or eating. Some of these folks were quite religious, it didn't matter.
The point is not that I have some sort of ability to decide what is or is not Islamic, and have made appopriate corrections, that would be dumb of me, the point is that in fact the diversity and multifacetedness of Muslim society is such that at times what one person, even a learned person, even an Imam, describes as something that is typical of Muslim societies, another person who considers himself quite intimate with such societies wonders what he's talking about. And that's two Iraqi Shi'a at this point.
I learned this lesson in a rather stark way living in Indonesia, where my secretary was a pious, believing Muslim with a scarf covering her hair. I got to know her fairly well, and one day some dude came by in a bike, and she hopped on. I asked the next day if this was her fiance. No, she said, just my boyfriend. It came as quite a shock to me because in many Arab societies, and certainly Iraq, hopping on the back of a bike of a man not related to you is likely to get you killed, and no respectable woman ever utters the word "boyfriend". But in her circles in Surabaya, this was clearly not the case.
The point is that I think all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim tend to generalize from our own experiences, and that this can mask some of the wondrous varieties of the Islamic faith. I can't imagine a veiled Muslim woman with a boyfriend. The Sayyid can't imagine liberal use of the word "dear" in missives. The Indonesian secretary looks at us and thinks we must be of some sort of cult. We see certain types around us, they then seem typical, we extrapolate, and out comes Islam as recreated from our own experiences, while the reality is considerably more subtle.
This natural and often harmless phenomenon replays itself to much more devastating effect, I think, the reaction of all too many Americans to Islam post 9/11. They see the horrors, they see some random Palestinian village dancing, they know no other Muslims, brave men like Sayyid Qazwini try to reach out, but in the fear and the noise and the cacophony and the ignorance, an ugly picture starts to emerge. And all of a sudden a group of violent, angry, stupid group of thugs, a group that if they ever crossed paths with Sayyid Qazwini, or me, or my former Indonesian secretary, would behead us in an instant, these people start to define our faith. And we actually have to explain why we are different than people who want us as dead as they want any American dead. The complexity, the muliplicity, the variety and the wondrous totality of the Muslim experience disappears, and we're all reduced to something quite repulsive. It's probably the saddest aspect of our experience these days.
HAH
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