December 18, 2010
Leadership: What Is It and How to Deal with It? [Part One]
Section: WRITINGS | 256 reads
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Islam and Muslims in the West
Truth is needed right here in the Western part of Allah’s world about Islam and Muslims.
The West has been for centuries home to those who profess allegiance to earlier prophets and messengers of Allah – Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and others in the Bible – may Allah bless them all.
The West is now, for the past some decades – once again – home to increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants, converts and their native-born Muslim offspring.
Not that Muslims were ever completely out of Europe and the West. Their expulsion from Granada, Spain, in 1492, was but a chapter in the long history of Islam’s and Muslims’ association with the West.
As was their expulsion from other parts of Europe – Hungary, Prague, Vienna.
As were their more recent tribulations in Bosnia, when they were brought to the brink of genocide at the hands of Serb nationalists.
In the same way, the return of Muslims in large numbers to the West in more recent times is merely another chapter – one of the most recent ones – in their checkered and eventful history in the West.
But history at the present time is in a fast-forward mode. Events accelerate at breakneck speed.
Ka Lamhil Basar, as the Qur’an puts it in Soorah Annahl, 16, in Ayah 77, referring to events on the Day of Judgment.
Paraphrase:
Like the blinking of an eye (16:77).
Muslims were allowed – by God of course, who else? – a few decades to get their act together, as the saying goes.
This meant a number of things, among them the following:
- Get hold of the truth about themselves and Islam and the new environment in which they found themselves in the West.
- Come up with some useful, practical and up-to-date ideas on how to be Muslims – how to practice Islam; what it means to be Muslim – in the Western world – with all its wealth and power and with all its technological, social, economic and political sophistication, access and opportunities. On how to be Muslims in a way that would be beneficial for Muslims as well as non-Muslims.
In some ways, the new Muslims in the West did a remarkable job. They used this God-given opportunity to establish communities, mosques and schools.
In some other ways, they were less successful. Most important of all, they were unable to leave their historical baggage behind.
Many of them were frozen into a mental frame that looked at the West as the enemy of a thousand years, rather than as their home of the present and a God-given opportunity for the future.
Some of their scholars, leaders, busybodies and activists produced all kinds convoluted social models in the name of Islam some of which taught Muslims everything about how to make do in the alien and hostile environment of the West and virtually nothing about their natural obligation to build a permanent home and a future for themselves and their children in their new place of immigration.
As a result, many Muslims lived in the West – and hated the West. Many of them took advantage of the educational, economic and financial opportunities in the West – and cursed the West.
Many young Muslims were fed diets of messages in the name of Islam that over time distanced and alienated them from proper grounding in their native Western environment. Some of these young people went scampering to deserts and mountains back home – wherever that was and whatever it meant – in search of purer and more perfect and nourishing Islamic pastures.
Others – with an eye on the color of money and also with a desire to be of service while the going was good – simply dedicated themselves to tapping into the increasingly deep and rich pockets of the Muslims and the captive market that the Muslim consumers of the West offered.
Halal food, Islamic books, services and conventions and Muslim trinkets thrived. Dead or alive, Muslims were good for business.
Islam became big business.
Yet others saw in the growing wealth of Muslims in the West a boundless opportunity for raising funds for their favorite causes and charities – once again, back home – and exploited it with single-minded concentration.
Jum’ah Khutbahs, as if they were not already stillborn and perfunctory on most Mimbars in most places in the world, were given a final blow by turning them into blatant pleas for dollars, pounds and other hard currency – for any cause or purpose anywhere.
Lost in the midst of all this excitement and flurry of Islamic enterprise was a simple question: What kind of future were the Muslims building for themselves and their children right here in the West – five years, fifteen, fifty, one hundred years from today?
But time and tide wait for no one. Allah turned the wheel of time – as he always does. And all of a sudden the roof came down on the heads of the Muslims in the West.
The environment in the West – and all over the world – changed suddenly to make Muslims the victims of doubt, fear, suspicion and manhunt.
There were no large-scale barbed wired compounds and corrals for the Muslims – at least not yet and certainly not in the traditional sense, but the Muslims were now being herded in increasing numbers into electronic holding pens with electronic fences and monitoring devices – but life for Muslims in the West, or anywhere else, was not to be the same again.
Then on a clear day, out of a blue sky, came thunderbolts of divine wrath targeting Muslim torpor, misdeed and misdirection.
From that moment on, life changed for the Muslims in the West: at the airports; on board the airplanes; at embassy counters during entry and exit applications; at customs and immigration checkpoints; on the road; on college campuses; and practically everywhere else.
Remember Soorah Wal ‘Asr? Remember how in that Soorah Allah evokes the powerful notion of time to warn human beings to get their act together as it were?
All of a sudden – as if Allah had not warned the Muslims along with the non-Muslims – Wal ‘Asr happened to the Muslims in the West.
In any case, the presence of Islam and Muslims in the West, therefore, is not a new one. It is an old, old story.
Many Muslims don’t realize this. But what most Muslims generally don’t ask is, if the story is an old and oft-repeated one, does the ending always have to be the same.
And that is a function of flawed leadership.
For, that is what leadership is all about: the ability, the foresight, the understanding and the skill to ask the right questions at the right time and to offer answers that point the way to success – for Muslims and for others; right here in this world as well as in the next world.
Muslims were, after all, the ones who were sent into this world with the golden key to the ultimate win-win solution to every human problem.
Alas, how easily Muslims tend to misplace that key at every opportunity they get!
From being a potential win-win – win for Muslims and win for non-Muslims – the situation in the West fast turned on its head and became lose-lose for both.
The Qur’an, once again, proved itself right.
Next Article: Leadership: What Is It and How to Deal with It? [Part Two]
Previous Article: I Too Have A Dream!
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