Muslims in America

The most interesting and educational time of my life was when I attended Rutgers College of Rutgers University in New Brunswick NJ. Here I got the opportunity of bouncing off ideas with people of all backgrounds and of various faiths. Still one of the biggest regrets I have is that I spent way too much time with the Muslim community there instead of reaching out and fully immersing myself in American mainstream- as I ought to have done as an international student studying in the most scientifically and technologically advanced country in the world.

While all ethnic and religious communities have a limiting effect, a Muslim community in a Non-Muslim majority country leaves very little room to operate for its adherents. The cruelest victims of this are the international students in the US who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars only to have an experience that is little better than attending a school or college in their own country.

Don’t get me wrong- I am all for Muslim identity and genuine interests that the Muslim minority in America has, but frankly what I don’t get is overbearing role dogma plays in every action of the Muslim community in America. The community thus resorts to control freakery of the worst kind invoking the scripture in order to exercise complete and total control over every single person who – out of either love for Islam or some sort of communal consciousness or homesickness- identifies themselves as a part thereof.

Slowly every single action or step you take is somehow dependent on what your “Shaikh� feels the Quran might say. Sure enough Quran has a set of principles (like being honest, just, equitable etc) that can govern any and every segment of your life but these form a general code of conduct.

For the most part, Quran does not regulate a believer’s everyday life with an intention to choke him. The Quran for example does not define the dress of men and women- no matter how much you stretch the Quranic injunction about a woman covering her bosom to mean head cover. Islam certainly has no one uniform nor is it some sort of a doctrine which seeks to create a collective virtually indistinguishable from each other as Mullahs would have us believe. I would venture so far as to say that a Muslim woman in a low cut dinner dress or a mini-skirt might be a better Muslim than a Niqabi or a Hijabi if she honestly applies Quranic principles of honesty, justice and equity in her daily life. Therefore the obsession of the Mullah with a woman’s “modesty� has nothing to with Islam. Yet in the US and other western countries, the issue of Hijab is of fundamental importance.

Somehow all Islamic worship and religious doctrine comes down to how free one is to wear one’s Hijab. Indeed, if Muslims in the west had not made such a big deal out of the Hijab, there wouldn’t be such resistance against it. The Muslims chose to reduce Islam to Hijab and instead of living their lives as good honest hardworking Muslims in countries which accord equal opportunity to them such as United States of America, Great Britain and France, our co-religionists go about creating problems for themselves by insisting on something that is utterly useless for the Muslim community.

All of the countries named above give far more individual and religious freedoms than all Muslim countries in the world. Yet you won’t find these spirited civil rights activists fighting for Muslim rights in the US ever point a finger at Saudi Arabia or Iran. And truth be told, it is the same secular and liberal democracy that they oppose in their own countries which gives them their rights in the West- the right to protest for example. How many Muslim countries actually allow their citizens the right to protest on paper? Very few! And how many of them actually allow such protests? Hardly any! Why such double standards then?

But such political double standards are not all that ails the Muslim community in the US. There is no rational leadership available to community be it politically or spiritually. For the most part the community is too theologically divided for the religious divines to provide any sane and rational leadership in any field. What the community needs are lawyers, doctors, engineers, economists and college professors to step up to plate and wrest the leadership of the Muslim community from the mosque and take matters in their own hands. Unfortunately, that is not possible as long as the US government continues to encourage retrogressive “traditionalists� naively assuming that traditionalism provides a better solution to these problems.

A traditionalist is simply a lazy extremist- a fact that is often lost on most people. People like Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir who wish to turn the vigorous youth of the American Muslim community kufi-wearing orthodox Imams are doing no less a disservice to Muslims as the radicals. Sadly these people are given undue importance by the highest echelons of the US government. I fear that the US government is making the same mistake Gandhi made in 1920s when he made alliances with the Mullahs who he considered to be closer to the Muslim masses and in the process drove away secular Muslims like Jinnah from the Indian National Congress.

During the time I was at Rutgers, along with a group of likeminded friends I founded what later developed in the Progressive Muslim movement all around America which became famous in the earlier part of the present decade. The progressive movement in the American Muslim community thus kicked off one evening (fall of 2000) over Sheesha in a quaint little Lebanese café on Easton Ave in New Brunswick.

What we had agitated about earlier in the day was lack of Shiite representation amongst Islamic scholars who spoke at the Islamic Society at Rutgers University – then (and probably still) dominated by Salafi Muslims who considered Shias Non-Muslims. But soon we broadened the scope of the movement to include such things as the election of a woman president and pre-screening of religious scholars to stop them from preaching a fundamentalist version of the faith.

The Muslim community at Rutgers University became sharply divided and the whole matter was reported in the snational press. This led to similar revolts within the Muslim community in campuses all around America, where young Muslims refused to allow their organizations to be hijacked by the Salafi coterie. In 2003, a Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q. Nomani took up the issue and ran with it attracting the attention of mainstream news media including the New York Times. But while her involvement highlighted the movement, it also served to discredit it. As a single unwed mother clamoring the right to pray shoulder to shoulder with men and also lead them in prayer, Asra went on to publish her own “Islamic Bill of Rights� which included the right to consensual pre-marital sex – alienating those who were otherwise willing to support the progressive Muslim cause. A better approach would have been to insist that a person’s sexuality was their own business and between the believer and his or her god. Also she – by purporting to be Rosa Parks of the Muslim women in the mosque- brought the mosque back at the center of the discourse, whereas the original intent behind the progressive movement was to bring the Muslims out in the real world.

An even better approach is that of the Hasan family- more notably Asma Gul Hasan – a lawyer and author- and Muhammad Ali Hasan- a budding Republican politician. Their parents, immigrants from Pakistan, are successful professionals who have long associated themselves with the Republican Party for which they have been booed by the Muslim community. Yet today they more than the endless list of Muslim imams and kufi wearing traditionalists are in a position to best safeguard the legitimate Muslim interests in Washington.

The enterprising Hasans have done more than the entire Progressive Muslim Movement combined. The same model ought to be repeated by every able Muslim in America for only then can Muslims play their rightful role as proud Americans of Muslim origin and as representatives of the global Muslim community.