New Literature for a New Era

Opportunist Politicians

But the issue stopped being about the teacher and the school and became about Islam and Muslims the moment politicians from Jack Straw to Tony Blair grabbed it as a weapon in their global war of values and ideology against Islam and Muslims.

Straw should be the last man going after the veil, because nearly 30 percent of his constituency is Muslim. Politicians simply don’t do a thing like that unless they have thought it carefully through and discovered a very good political reason for doing it.

As for Blair, this war against Islam and Muslims is his personal war. He is a true believer and he is in it on conviction and purpose.

For politicians lying in wait for opportunities to denigrate Islam and demoralize Muslims, the veil issue arrived on an open platter. Even for a profession notorious for opportunism, this was a performance well above the norm.

For Straw the veil was a hindrance for integration and an inhibitor of free and open communication between people. And for Blair it was a clear mark of separation.

The politicians seem to be saying, but for the canker of the Muslim veil, Britannia would be a paradise of racial, ethnic and cultural integration and bonhomie.

The labor judge who heard the teacher’s case against wrongful dismissal was unsparing in taking to task both Straw and Blair for their comments.

Britain and Europe Test the Limits of Their Freedoms

Britain took its time sauntering into where France and Denmark had already jumped with both feet. France could not endure the strain on its two-hundred-year-old traditions of liberty and equality and promptly banned the practice of Muslim girls wearing a headscarf to school. France saw all kinds of dangers lurking under the foot-long cloth perched on the head of a 14-year-old school girl.

In a society where any level of nakedness may not raise anything other than a lustful voyeur’s prurient passion, a Muslim head covering raises all kinds of fears and objections among opportunistic and racist politicians.

Politicians in Denmark thought cartoons of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, were cute. To Muslims around the world, they were the worst insult and personal attack they could imagine.

Politicians called them a matter of freedom of expression. Muslims saw them as a deliberate provocation taking advantage of Muslims’ absolute and unqualified love and respect for the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, on the one hand, and their weakness and vulnerability in Europe and elsewhere in the world, on the other hand.

As for freedom of expression, Muslims had just been down that road and seen how far that goes when it comes to Islam and Muslims. The case of the Muslim headscarves in France was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

To many Muslims in France and elsewhere an official ban on female headscarves in schools was an attack on those poor Muslim girls’ modesty, on their Islam, on their culture, on their ethnicity, on their dignity, on their rights as free children and citizens of a free and civilized France, and on their very status as women and as human beings.

Truth: The Missing Link

So, Muslims – and the world – have gotten a pretty clear idea of how far the Western notion of freedom of expression goes.

Many in the West seem to have issues that are larger and deeper than run-of-the-mill notions of personal rights and freedom. Among these issues is the issue of race as well as the issue of truth. In fact, truth is often the missing link in all too many of these issues.

For many in the West, truth sometimes seems to have the same relationship with them that a ray of golden sunshine is said to have had with the notorious fictional vampire, Count Dracula. They both could not survive in the same room for long.

As for race, that is an altar that continues to attract large numbers of worshippers throughout the West to this day – some overt and many hiding in hoods.

Western Race-Worship

Therefore, the veil issue in England masks a hotchpotch of several things: it masks some Muslims’ ignorance of Islam; it masks the egoism and penchant for power and prominence on the part of some Muslims; it masks the usual garden variety racism that pervades British society at many levels; it masks official and government opportunism; and it masks political cynicism and contempt for truth.

Clearly, Blair is fired up with a messianic zeal that would have done the Crusaders proud. It translates into invasion and occupation of Muslim lands abroad and jumping on the anti-Islam and anti-Muslim bandwagon at home.

And all too often the glue that binds it all together is blatant racism and bald-faced lying, duplicity and deceit. Straw and many in the rest of the Labor as well as Conservative establishments make up the choir in this great tabernacle dedicated to race, wealth, country and power worship.

Old fashioned virtues like truth, justice, equality, honesty, integrity and courage seem to be calling in sick on too many days for too many of these politicians.

Super-Islam or Simple Alienation

The trouble is compounded by the fact that some Muslims seem to have their own home-grown variety of super-Islam of some kind that often seeks to upstage the usual mainstream Islamic routine practiced by most others. Some of these super-Islamists seem to want to go an extra mile of devotion, not always in their own quiet private domain, but in a manner that seems to impinge on other people’s lives and consciousness in public space.

But what both the Muslims and the non-Muslims in the West need to really come to grips with is this: To what extent the veil issue – and a whole range of other similar issues – are genuinely in the domain of Islam and to what extent they are symptoms of underlying personal and social problems experienced by individuals associated with them.

And, in the same way, also, to what degree these issues are products of the frustration, disaffection and alienation resulting from the prejudice, racism, discrimination, marginalization and disfranchisement that Muslims may encounter in British and European societies against Islam and Muslims on a day to day basis.

Islam and Muslims Are the New West

At the same times, what everyone seems to be forgetting in this medley of events, words and images is that the West now has a new identity: Islam. That is because a sizable slice of the West’s population now is Muslim.

And that part of the West, whose number runs into tens of millions, now professes and practices Islam.

But neither the West nor the Muslims seem to have a proper understanding of this most remarkable phenomenon. If they did, the Muslims would show greater pride of ownership and sense of responsibility and belonging in their new home, the West.

By the same token, the other major stakeholders in the West in the form of politicians, the media and others would show greater respect for the feelings, sentiments and rights of their new neighbors and fellow-citizens, the Muslims.

What everyone needs to tell themselves is this: Muslims in the West are citizen participants in their new homes and cultures. They are not in the West as somebody else’s guests, who will be here today and gone tomorrow. But, rather, they are in the West by their own right of ownership. Just like every other citizen that the West ever had.

And they may not only stay here as long as those who boarded the train earlier, but they may also play a key role in shaping and directing the character and destiny of their new home in the West for as long as it may please Almighty God.

A Bunch of Brits – Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road

A year or so before the terrible events of 911, I had an opportunity to give a set of lectures to a leadership group of Muslim youth in Britain that had been cobbled together from several parts of the country.

Right at the outset I told them, much to the chagrin of some and the amusement of a few, that whatever else they were or were not, to me they were just a bunch of Brits.

“And the only thing wrong with you,” I said, “is not your Islam, but the fact that, like the rest of your fellow-Brits, you drive on the ‘wrong’ side and not, like us Americans, on the ‘right’ side of the road.”

By calling them Brits I was trying to break the cocoon in which Most Muslims in Britain tend to hide, including the younger generations.

To all too many of them, Britain was still the host country. Even though many of them were born and brought up in Britain and knew no other home besides it.

History tells us that often Muslims stumble past life’s new challenges and experiences through a painful and prolonged process of trial and error. Rarely is there any systematic thinking about the problem or any serious planning for the future. Nor is there always effective leadership to deal with the present.

All of this often makes Muslim life a miracle of survival. The TV show – Survivor – must have gotten its story idea from us. For we are, like Iqbal said, even though he said it in a more positive and robust sense, a marvel of survival: Idhar doobay, udhar niklay; udhar doobay, idhar niklay. Paraphrase: Like the sun, we rise and set here, there and everywhere.

Why then should this new phase of Muslim and Islamic history in Britain and Europe be any different?

A Compact Islamic Core – And Wide Latitude

In Islam God Almighty gave people a compact and coherent set of core beliefs and behaviors. At the same time, God also gave them wide latitude for doing these things on a day-to-day basis.

God sent a personal messenger to hand-deliver this divine package to the world. This messenger, the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, then taught and explained the divine package of Islam to the world.

He also actually modeled every one of Islam’s teachings himself to show how they all worked in the real world on a daily basis.

What many people – both Muslim and non-Muslim – don’t understand is that built into each element of that core package of Islam was an unbelievable range of options, variations and possibilities.

This was absolute proof that this system of Islam could only have come from God Almighty. For, its resilience and flexibility were nothing short of miraculous. No human source could possibly pack its core system with so many “outs” and “loopholes” for its users.

It was as if the entire divine law was written under the watchful eye of a powerful human lobby. That is how user-friendly, as they say, everything about Islam really is.

Perfect Homeostasis of the Islamic System

And it is quite simple to understand: a system without an inbuilt mechanism to cope with the stresses of change in time, place and circumstance cannot survive for long. It simply cannot withstand the test of time.

That is precisely what happened to Christianity. And to every other system of any kind that was ever propounded in this world at any time. And that is precisely why Christianity had to undergo so many changes and transformations, including the Reformation.

Islam, on the other hand, did not and does not need a Reformation, in part because Islam comes with its own inbuilt homeostatic system of perfect balance and equilibrium at all times, in all climes and environments, and under all conditions and circumstances.

It is failure to understand or appreciate this basic fact about the nature of Islam that leads to so much confusion, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, on such issues as Islam and modernity or Islam in the West or Islam and something else.

Or, for that matter, gives rise to situations in which some Muslim women may insist, in the name of Islam, on veiling their faces, not while they are alone by themselves or with their families and friends, and not while walking down the streets, but while teaching students in a classroom, even though, reportedly, the same women may show a readiness to unveil when facing a job interview.

Some Concessions Inbuilt into the Islamic System

Here are some examples of the concessions that God Almighty provided his people:

1. God Almighty in the Qur’an forbade believers from eating swine flesh (lahmal khinzeer). But not if you ran into an emergency and pork was all the food that was available.

2. You must use water to wash up for your daily prayers – salaah. And that was nearly 1400 years before the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) discovered that washing hands may not be such a bad idea.

   But what if water was unavailable or you were too sick to use water? Well, how about sand – clean dust – the kind that no part of the earth will ever be without?

   Use that sand or dust instead to seek divinely ordained cleanliness that would allow you to perform your “prayers.”

   How can anyone go wrong with a formula like that?

3. Everyone’s required midday prayers – Zuhr – are normally four units. That is how it is and that is how it will be – forever and ever.

   But that only holds when you are staying at home. If you set out on a journey, then the required minimum number is reduced by half to two units.

   That is right. A full 50 percent off the original requirement for Zuhr, Asr and Isha – the midday, the afternoon and the late night prayers – when you are traveling.

   Who knows if modern marketing got its “Sale” idea from Islam?

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